In which antivaccinationist Ginger Taylor is taught a lesson, and not by Orac

Need I say more: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OISR3al5Bnk

Key words Todd: “real vaccine injuries.”

To Delysid, a round of applause and a high-pitched, “nailed it!”

Every once in a while, when this nonsense starts, the masses you wouldn’t expect come out and highlight just how fringe the fringe is. But like the HuffPo article going viral, more people need to do it.

The same filthy-mouthed Ginger Taylor who set the example for the Thinking Moms. The same Ginger Taylor who spreads lies and who inserted herself into the Crosby/Bolen fiasco. (Good for entertainment value, though).

Good on “Delysid” for calling Ginger out on her defamatory lies…whoever (s)he is.

Orac:
” which is not even a degree that would make one qualified to judge basic research”.

Totally agreed.
It’s possible that she was not at all required to take experimentally-based courses that are dependent upon research ( e.g. perception, cognition, developmental, physiology etc) or much about statistical analysis or research design.

She probably did not have to submit research proposals or work with researchers. While this is called “clinical” it’s not the same as clinical psych which would include more of what I refer to above, even at a master’s level.

Same goes for Mac Neil’s social work degree and focus on psychotherapy.

My HTML-fu didn’t get the link in properly, apparently:

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/09-152.pdf

@Beamup

The way I understood it, that simply means that they cannot go directly to civil court for design defect claims. First they need to go through the vaccine court. Once they have done that, they are free to accept or appeal the decision by the Special Master. If that fails, they may then go on to civil court.

ANd along comes today’s Dilbert to bring its jaundiced eye to bear on the proceedings:
http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2013-09-26/

@sirhcton

You are correct. Win or lose, reasonable attorneys’ fees are paid by the program.

Denice Walter,

She may have had some research courses but she either:

1. Doesn’t remember them
2. Cannot see her objectivity is compromised because of her intimacy with the subject matter.
3. All of the above.

For my MSW degree while clinically focused had a research aspect. I had to go through the whole process from proposal, IRB filing, data collecting, SPSS, interpretation, discussion, writing the results, presentation, questions and answers as part of my degree. It depends upon the school as to what the focus is. I know there is an MSSW degree which is heavily research focused. You could be spot on though as her college/university is not heavily research focused. Mine (USF) is so I received the benefit of both research and clinical training.

There can be very little doubt that vaccines can and do cause autism. In these children, the evidence for a n adverse reaction involving brain injury following the MMR that progresses to an autism diagnosis is compelling. It’s now a question of the body count. The parents’ story was right all along. Governments must stop playing with words while children continue to be damaged . My hope is that recognition of the intestinal disease in these children will lead to the relief of their suffering. This is long , long overdue .”

OMFG! Bamobo is so totally on to us!

S/he’s aware of the brain altering/ brainwashing, subliminally conditioned shopping, hypno-television, pagan rituals and the shape shifting reptile/ human bodyshare programme.

And the Daily Paul’s own logo mentions “GOLD”** which is, of course, key to his Lordship’s ultimate plan. It also includes – “peace and love”. We can’t have that.

Frigging Freedom Fighters, they’ll get you everytime.

** there’s an AU in Paul. That explains everything.

The way I understood it, that simply means that they cannot go directly to civil court for design defect claims. First they need to go through the vaccine court. Once they have done that, they are free to accept or appeal the decision by the Special Master. If that fails, they may then go on to civil court.

No. We’ve been through this. Post-Bruesewitz, the only path after the OSM is a perfunctory review by Court of Federal Claims, then the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, and then SCOTUS. That’s it.

First off, Orac, thanks for everything you are doing. I share your passion for “science-based medicine.” I stumbled upon your other blog while investigating Natural News and Mike Adams a few months ago (or a year ago?) and I’ve been reading your work more and more frequently. Funny stuff. I consider him my nemesis with how frequently people on Facebook and my favorite sites blast me with Natural News links. Despite my best efforts to debunk him it just keeps coming.

I’ve never met him or corresponded with him personally (or on the internet, to my knowledge), but the other day I got into a several hours long public Facebook debate with fairly well known activist (thousands of followers) and her friends against the naturalistic fallacy and Natural News, and the next day Adams published a scathing attack on how “dentists are psychopaths.”

I’d like to think that I influenced that outburst and that it was an indirect attack on me. Maybe some of his paranoid insanity has rubbed off on me, but the timing, content, and language seems to be too relevant to be a coincidence.

I had a good laugh. It’s not the first time I’ve been suspicious that my scathing criticism of him on libertarian outlets had an an impact. Orac has pissed him something awful, too, no doubt.

But I want to clear up a few misconceptions I read here.

Ginger Taylor has no moderating abilities on the Daily Paul and nothing in that thread was censored. Censorship over there is very rare and reserved for chronic hostility and lunacy. I’ve been a paying subscriber to that site for 2 or 3 years now and the moderators and owner know me by first and last name. Comments retract and turn grey and become invisible to guests at a default of negative 7 cumulative votes. To see them all you need is a free sign-up.

In my lurking on Insolence I’ve noticed some strong criticism of the liberty movement. It’s understandable because there is an extremely vocal group of quacks that have latched onto the movement and it’s frustrating as hell. Having been immersed in the culture for a few years, however, I’ve realized that it is strongly a parasitic relationship.

Generalizing my observations, many (not all) so-called liberty activists are first and foremost alternative alternative medicine advocates who are using the liberty as a medium for their propaganda. There is a lot overlap with the quacks, but conspiracy theorists do the same thing. It’s frustrating because the lunatic fringe tends to yell the loudest and muddy other legitimate points with pseudoscience gibberish.

A lot of people who oppose government control over society are trying to deny the science government is involved in. They don’t realize that although government can control the laws of society, but not the laws of nature.

I published an essay about this on the Daily Paul in August. It got one upvote. Maybe you Orac and your readers would find it more interesting.

http://www.dailypaul.com/296506/government-can-manipulate-the-laws-of-society-but-not-the-laws-of-nature

“Comments retract and turn grey and become invisible to guests at a default of negative 7 cumulative votes.”

I cannot understand why websites (and Daily Paul is not the only one) allow people to cast negative votes on a post and cause it to “disappear”, even if it’s just to guests. What that does is enable a form of censorship in which views are deemed “not helpful” to the discussion – but all it really does is encourage people to shout down unpopular ideas.

If you want to deal with virulent invective and outright trolling, there’s a much better way – it’s called “moderation”. Too bad some sites are too lazy to moderate their forums.

well, at least orac has moved on from demonizing woo crap—-grew up maybe; still, hard to understand why orac would want to spend time overwriting—-as orac is prone to do—-and not just do his/her science, if, indeed, orac is a scientist(so claimed). Having said that, I do that the anti-vac folks are “woos” themselves. So long

They were awarded damages for the Vaccine Table Injury encephalitis. Encephalitis is not autism.

Certainly nothing in either decision argues that Wakefield’s Lancet paper was anything other than fraudulent.

Keating Willcox: “Here is a list of 28 studies from around the world that support Dr. Wakefield’s research:”

Oh, I love that list. Especially the brain dead cutting and pasting where they don’t notice it cites an entire year of a journal! Oh, and it is also old news and very wrong:
http://justthevax.blogspot.com/2011/05/still-no-independent-confirmation-of.html

Also, Keating Willcox, the 2012 Vaccine Court decision was a table injury, and has nothing to do with autism.

And then about this: “There can be very little doubt that vaccines can and do cause autism. In these children, the evidence for a n adverse reaction involving brain injury following the MMR that progresses to an autism diagnosis is compelling.”

The MMR has been in use in the USA since 1971, and was the preferred vaccine for the 1978 Measles Elimination Program. The USA is much larger than the UK, and its MMR vaccine was used for a much longer time before the UK introduced three MMR vaccines in 1988. So if the MMR vaccine causes autism it would have been noticed before Wakefield came on the scene. Please provide verifiable evidence dated before 1990 that autism in the USA went up during the 1970s and 1980s coincident to the use of the MMR vaccine with the Jeryl Lynn mumps component.

Ok, that’s not fair. How come Chris and lilady were allowed to post links?

DB @29: Two of those papers were published in the 1970s, so those papers don’t support Wakefield’s results (the reverse might have been true if Wakefield’s results had not been fraudulent). I also see a paper from Medical Hypotheses, a paper from the first issue of the journal it’s published in, a paper from a Venezuelan journal, and one that is clearly labeled as an abstract. That’s without actually looking up any of those papers. I would be skeptical that any of the other 22 papers are both (1) published in reputable journals and (2) actually support Wakefield’s results. I have a hunch that some of those papers really do cite Wakefield’s, but to criticize his results rather than to support them (Wakefield’s paper had not yet been retracted).

AnObservingParty was correct: Just the Vax published a thorough takedown of the claim that Keating Willcox regurgitated here. Since links seem problematic, a search for that site and “Still no independent confirmation of Wakefield’s claims” will turn up the evidence that Willcox never read the papers that he cited.

The first article (Gastrointestinal abnormalities in children with autistic disorder) does not support Wakefield’s claims re: the MMR vaccine being causally associated the development of autism. In fact, it doesn’t mention MMR or measles at all.

Ditto for the second article (Colonic CD8 and gamma delta T-cell infiltration with epithelial damage in children with autism).

And for the third (Intestinal lymphocyte populations in children with regressive autism: evidence for extensive mucosal immunopathology)

And the fourth (Elevated cytokine levels in children with autism spectrum disorder).

And the fifth (Antibodies to myelin basic protein in children with autistic behavior).

The sixth citation actually does address measles virus and autism (Elevated levels of measles antibodies in children with autism). It’s VK Singh’s comment, claiming that he’s found elevated levels of antibodies against measles in the serum of autistic children, but not their siblings or non-autistic children. This finding has never been reproduced; instead, multiple large scale independent studies have failed repeatedly to uncover any association between measles and/or the measles vaccine and autism.

The seventh—but then, there’s really no need to go on. Is there?

Surprising nobody, Keating Wilcox’s facebook page is riddled with crank magnetism at work. far-right-wing nuttery, homophobia, golabl warming denialism, antifeminism/’men’s rights,’ various altie nonsense…and that’s just from the past week.

So, Keating, how many of those 28 studies have you actually read?

Ironically, he also quotes Feynman:

“There are myths and pseudo-science all over the place. I might be quite wrong, maybe they do know all this … but I don’t think I’m wrong, you see I have the advantage of having found out how difficult it is to really know something. How careful you have to be about checking the experiments, how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself. I know what it means to know something. And therefore, I see how they get their information and I can’t believe that they know it. They haven’t done the work necessary, they haven’t done the checks necessary, they haven’t taken the care necessary. I have a great suspicion that they don’t know and that they’re intimidating people.”

Mr. Wilcox, I recommend you spend some time checking experiments carefully, and being especially aware of “how easy it is to make mistakes and fool yourself.”

Eric Lund: “Thanks for confirming my suspicions.”

Thanks and your welcome. That list was being spammed so much a couple of years ago, some of us decided to tackle it. And it has happened again with another set of studies that Liz Ditz listed at her site. It starts here:
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2013/08/-those-lists-of-papers-that-claim-vaccines-cause-autism-part-1.html
and continues to:
http://lizditz.typepad.com/i_speak_of_dreams/2013/08/that-other-list-of-papers-30-scientific-studies-that-demonstrate-vaxes-can-cause-autism.html

@ brian & AnObservingParty: I think you both got stuck in moderation because the Just The Vax thread you tried to link to, had a slew of links embedded in it.

Keating Willcox @19:
The usual plagiastic copy-pasta. About About 36,700 copies, sez Google.

Keating Wilcox @20:

18,200 copies.

Keating Willcox @21: 2,680 copies.

Stupid, lazy and plagiaristic is no way to go through life.

How perfect that Ginger is a Paulite, Ron Paul is the Mike Adams of politics.

Reading Keating Wilcox reminds me of the joy I’d see on my kids’ faces at age 2 when they’d discover they could play with the poop in their diapers but didn’t realize it would earn them a long bath with a scrub down later.

It reminds of the predictions involved in quantitive population genetics. The computations and models sound impressive and some gorgeous, colorful charts are produced, then we realize that basically nothing was accurately predicted and the process starts over with altered models.

Umm…as a population geneticist I can tell you that this is not an accurate description of the field, like at all. Many old population genetics models are being validated in humans now that large enough datasets of genetic variation are available. Here’s a great recent example:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=23201682

It’s pretty tough to predict the direction of evolution.

I didn’t mean to insult the field of population genetics at all. I actually did my final undergrand senior biology seminar presentation on awesome population genetics study.

Science is much better at figuring out what and why something happened than predicting the future of what and why.

I haven’t been fed anything.

It seems to me we are on two different pages here.

But I admit to having a very weak understanding of these models.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Models_of_DNA_evolution#See_

But I don’t think this invalidates my point. Despite the impressive quantifive aspects, I stand by statement about uncertainty after uncertainty. This is what climatologists do. This is also what econometrists do. I reject this method.

Off-topic, but it seems some of the most scandalous goings-on in oncology in Houston, Texas, do _not_ involve the Burzynski clinic.

http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Cancer-doctor-indicted-for-poisoning-coffee-of-4846629.php?cmpid=hpbn

You’ve gotta watch those breast cancer docs. 😉

Gonzalez-Angulo gave Blumenschein not just one cup of poisoned coffee, but two.

It was an honest mistake. How was she to know Blumenschein would *drink* what was obviously intended for an enema?

Delysid @55

Global climate models are based on so many uncertainties and projections on these uncertainties that aspects of climatology enter the realm of pseudoscience.

The people who do these models are acutely aware of the uncertainties and make allowances for them. However, anthropogenic CO2 puts such a huge thumb on the scales that ANY rational model shows the temperature going up very significantly for some time to come. None of the competeing effects that people have dreamed up that might keep this from happening has proven out. There’s a lot of uncertainty involved, but the basic conclusions of anthropogenic global warming are very well-tested, and it would be foolish to ignore them.

I know that’s considered to be heresey in some Libertarian circles, but as you’re acutey aware, scientific issues can’t be decided using political signifiers.

I’m going to speculate that Orac was busy yesterday. Ginger Taylor proven wrong? And in other news Jake Crosby has found a conspiracy and that chick from AoA is spamming the comments of every vaccine related news story.

@Kelly M Bray: noxious, but hardly surprising. I think that they believe that “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” To me, that saying is stupid as many things that don’t kill you do weaken you severely. Case in point: the organ damage caused by diphtheria, a vaccine preventable disease.

“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

My experience is that what doesn’t kill me, leaves me with a terrible hangover when I eventually wake up.

Kelly,

you might even go as far as saying that measles and other childhood diseases are a weeder out of those not fit to live and we’re not doing ourselves a favour.

It’s hard to believe anyone would say that in public, given recent human history.

You could equally argue that those children that are unable to tolerate vaccines are not fit to live, but it would be equally obnoxious.

@ Drugstoreemployee: I don’t now why the pharmacist dissuaded the customer from getting the shingles vaccine. It is possible that the pharmacist has knowledge of the customer’s preexisting conditions which are contraindications to receiving the shingles vaccine:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/shingles/vacc-need-know.htm

@ Denice, if you or anyone else is interested in what a fabulous “autism advocate” Rubolino is, just have a read here: http://theautismbureau.blogspot.com/2013/07/iaccick.html

Speaking of adenoviruses. I am still getting over one that was heavily circulating here. I apparently passed it to my husband who has GERD and it caused pericarditis that sent him to the emergency room. He had no other symptoms other than a little fatigue, a low grade fever he didn’t even know he had, and seroconversion which he wouldn’t know he had.
Anyway, I found that not only are adenoviruses not well understood, but that viral pericarditis isn’t well understood. Also, the hospital didn’t do a good job of explaining why it is important to take your GERD medication regularly even if you are not having symptoms and that esophageal damage can lead to semi-novel receptors becoming available to pathogens that commonly infected the esophagus.

My primary care doc, while not actively discouraging me from getting the shingles vaccine was dubious about it and cited an example of a patient who supposedly got shingles shortly after receiving the vaccine.

I am double-checking to see if he actually graduated from an accredited medical school.

@Krebiozen

The whole point of the climatology ‘controversy’ is that humans are playing a major role in the system. This means that human action throws in uncertain parameters. It is more similar to econometrics than some people are admitting, in my opinion.

I read the other day that finally for the first time a climatologist accounted for the massive number of artificial pools in a global climate change model.

There are conflicting opinions just on this thread (not including me) regarding the nature of climatology.

Delysid, have you ever read any of the actual science, as explained by the researchers themselves?

The recent review of the scientific literature from the World Meteorological Organization might be a good place to start:
http://www.climatechange2013.org/

Here’s the accompanying press release briefly summarizing their major points:
http://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/press_releases/pr_978_en.html

Calling all posters…

The Dachelbot and her flying monkey squad are deluging Emily Willingham’s latest blog about older autistic adults in Scotland:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emilywillingham/2013/09/25/where-are-all-the-older-autistic-people-scotland-for-example/

Please come and post… and I’m getting very lonely there//sigh.

@Kelly M. Bray, everything that is ‘natural’ happens for a reason, right? My cousin had a breech baby out of hospital. It died. Guess he wasn’t ‘strong enough’ to live. These children that just aren’t strong enough to fight measles, blah, they don’t matter.

I really do not understand this line of reasoning. Every child deserves to live. Every child deserves the best we adults can offer. To have a fighting chance. To not have to die from our stupidity. To benefit from generations of knowledge and science.

Orac, the Dachelbot is a gutless whelp, who only alerts her flying monkey squad AFTER she posts on a science blog and AFTER she departs those blogs.

The Dachelbot is my age and she “claims” she never saw a person with autism when she was growing up, or before her 27-year-old son John was diagnosed with Asperger Syndrome when he was in second grade:

http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/65006:anne-mcelroy-dachel–the-really-big-lie-about-autism

The Dachelbot, before she got her gig on AoA was involved with A-Champs, one of the original fringe groups that claimed mercury toxicities, in the form of Thimerosal in vaccines, causes autism.

It truly is amazing how John Dachel has progressed. He drives a car, plays piano and the organ, enjoys his own motorboat, has his own Facebook page and is listed as a technical advisor on Dachel’s videotaped interviews at the 2013 Autism One-Generation Rescue Conference.

I swear it is nothing short of a miracle !!! 🙂

@Denise

My political position on climate change is that politicians and their corresponding governments should not be involved or intervening in the economy. Society will adapt regardless of what happens. Mankind survived the Ice Age and there is no reason to think it won’t survive even the most apocalyptic doomsday predictions. Personally I think the alarmism of people like James Hansen is political fear mongering and embarrasing to science. But even if humans cause climate change, it seems to me that a good shake-up of geography and the climate will have benefits (except for the status quo of wealthy aristocrats living in their ocean-side mansions like Al Gore).

My scienctific position is that humans are probably playing a role in climate change, as we do inhabit the Earth, but I think the predictions of the quantitative models aren’t as conclusive as the powers at be want us to believe. Many scientists warned that nuclear meltdown was going to destroy the world, and now birds are nesting inside the Chernobyl sarcaphagus and wildlife is thriving in the radiation zone. How many scientists predicted that? The Earth will survive whatever we do to it.

Climatology is the worst of politicized science.

Liz,

I read one comment about Willingham on AofA that complained she was “sneering” in the photo that Forbes uses. She’s displaying obvious (and well-deserved) contempt toward the anti-vax nutbars, obviously.

This whole “The enemy of my enemy is my friend” meme is a very bad strategy, IMO. Sociopaths like Delysid are the enemy, just as much as any anti-vaxers, and their bass-ackwards philosophy—which has totally destroyed the world economy and set us back a century since Reagan the Gormless was elected—can and has caused much more widespread damage. Personally, I will spend the majority of my energy combating gLibertarian shıtweasels wherever I find them. The anti-vaxers will fall by the wayside automatically.

@ BattleAxe. That was spoken like a true humanitarian and intellectual.

@ herr doktor Creationism might be ridiculous, but it is not comparable to climatology. Creationism is rooted in faith in religious dogma, but belief in it has minimal effect on the rest of society. There are no forces trying to enforce “Creationism taxes and regulations to stop evolution.” Unlike rejection of vaccination, belief in creationism by itself doesn’t really affect human health if they accept the rest of evidence-based science.

I was so disappointed to see that ‘Alain Couvier’, thinking it was ‘our’ Alain, and it obviously wasn’t lol I just really can’t wrap my head around people like Ann Daschel

I keep wondering if I should blog & comment under my full name because of such situation and now that I intend to be a regular at Emily’s numerous blogs (she’s on my google+ feed). For now, I don’t have any cause for concern but I’m planning to be employed in a big IT corporation (SAP, CGI or another giant) and going forward to tell them I blog under my full name and I’m noted for my strong position in certain issues including autism.

Alain

#100 You are not correct. Creationism *does* affect acceptance of many other facets of science, including health, and creationists *do* attempt to enforce their beliefs on other facets of society–for example, by forcing changes in education and textbooks for people who are not creationists.

Alain, I mainly just ignore the other Alain because he craves the attention and just keeps cranking out his Spam.

Did someone mention Creationism and the infusion of Creationism and climate change denialism into textbooks?

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/09/texas-textbooks-review-creationism-climate-denial

Delysid @100:
Creationism might be ridiculous, but it is not comparable to climatology. Creationism is rooted in faith in religious dogma, but belief in it has minimal effect on the rest of society.

You are deliberately missing my point, which was not about the social impact of politicising biology vs. that of politicising climatology. My point is that it only takes one side to politicise an issue; and if the science pre-dates the political agenda, then this does not make it invalid.
For instance, genetics became politicised in the Soviet Union when Stalin decided that Lysenko’s quackery was a better fit to his goals than standard biology. That did not invalidate genetics.

In the case of climatology and AGW concerns, these pre-date their use as a political cudgel. They have been enlisted by environmentalists, and deprecated by lobbyists to the point that State governments have passed laws criminalising climate-change research, but this is irrelevant to the validity or otherwise of climatology. It was a bipartisan field until Al Gore entered his post-political career.

Delysid,

My political position on climate change is that politicians and their corresponding governments should not be involved or intervening in the economy.

I think that explains your attitude to global warming; a very serious problem has arisen that demands government intervention and this challenges your political dogma. Your only choices are to pretend it isn’t happening, to minimize its consequences, or to change your political position. It is clear which you have chosen from your comments.

Sadly global warming is happening, and it is going to have devastating consequences for millions of people and for thousands of species across the planet. There are arguments about our best strategies for dealing with this, but pretending it isn’t happening, or describing this as, “a good shake-up of geography and the climate”, don’t seem very effective to me (to put it politely).

@Delysid:
First, the obstacles creationists have met in pushing their Bronze Age fairytales into the schools have fueled the push for charter schools and publicly-funded private schools, usually, and literally, at the expense of public schools. As an attempt to end-run the First Amendment, I think it sets a dangerous precedent.
Second, as to global warming, just what kind of threat is your threshold for government intervention? I once read a completely serious essay claiming that from a libertarian viewpoint, if a killer meteor were found heading for Earth that governments had no moral right to try and stop it.

@ Alain:

Mon ami, I would still be careful: it’s one thing to have a blog, as you have already, under your own name, but I would still be careful around the ‘usual suspects’ ( i.e. AoA loyalists, Jake, Bolen et al) and I wouldn’t necessarily link to the blog.

There are ways of differentiating yourself from M Couvier:
1. you make sense
2. write *de Quebec* or suchlike
3. add another descriptive word or phrase( you’re creative)

@Jeff1971 – Wow. Just … wow …

Dr. Rima and dear hubby Stubblebine have their own entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons:

http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2013/01/378-albert-stubblebine-rima-laibow.html

@Militant Agnostic:
The Pauls, both Papa Doc and Baby Doc*, are indeed hypocrites. And Ron Paul is the man who puts the “Aryan” in “Libertarian”.

*Don’t recognize the reference? Search for it.

Dr. Rima and dear hubby Stubblebine have their own entry in the Encyclopedia of American Loons:
http://americanloons.blogspot.com/2013/01/378-albert-stubblebine-rima-laibow.html

She’s a keeper, to be sure. Woo and grift blend seamlessly.

My grammar was poor in the above comment because I deleted part of a sentence and didn’t catch the mistake before I submitted it.

@GuineaPig. So you are saying that someone cant’ be a good doctor and believe in creationism at the same time? The arrogance of that comment is unbelievable. The principles of evolution versus creationsim plays a negligible role in modern medicine. Was Ron Paul an incompetant OB/GYN because of his religious beliefs? Is Ben Carson a quack in pediatric neurosurgery because of his Seventh Day Adventism religious beliefs?

Give me a break.

@ Krebiozen #73

I agree with you about the scientific method of predicting and then experimenting to prove or falsify (OBVIOUSLY) which is exactly why climatology is far different from a field such as cancer research (which is far more repeatable and controllable than the study of the climate of entire planet).

As an example look at Cox inhibitors. In theory they seemed so straight forward until the unexpected cardiovascular side effects starting occurring. Or on the flip side look at a drugs like rifampicin that unexpectedly treat conditions like Parkinson’s.

Some of the monoclonal antibodies that theoretically had the potential to be ‘magic bullets’ turned out to be a disaster

I’m not a climatologist, but it seems inevitable (and obvious) that we have a far better understanding of biochemistry than climatology just based on the nature of the field and the scientific community is still terrible at predicting outcomes.

Also, just as conjecture, it seems that many of the people who go into climatology do it with the intention of ‘saving the planet.’ I can’t help but speculate that much of climatology is conducted with the intention of proving already preconceived notions about anthropogenic climate change.

Knowing a number of climatologists, I’d call that an insult – they just as interested in the hard science, regardless of what the outcome is…it just so happens that what they are finding is pointing to a growing problem…something that we all have an interest in making sure is resolved in such a way as to not cause overall hardship for the planet (and ourselves).

#125 Delysid… you yourself brought up climate change on this thread.

Not everyone here is “progressive,” and in fact there is a wide spectrum of political views here.

*What kind of schizophrenic mind games are you pulling to smear the ideology as the exact opposite of what it is?

Adaption is not the same thing as evolution from one species to another. Again, to emphasize, I am an atheist and far from a creationist, but you are misrepresenting their viewpoint.

It has been said by opponents that no one could defeat Ron Paul in is district because he was the OB/GYN for half of the women in two counties and they loved him. You have no basis whatsoever for the claim that “I’m surprised he ever had any patients” besides your own delusions. What evidence do you have that he was anything besides a competent physician?

“Thanks to my side?”

You mean my viewpoint, that as an atheist, people should be free to believe in whatever religion they want and that belief in creationism is totally compatible with the practice mainstream medicine? Are you a moron?

Texas will soon be hosting witch hunts?

Do you have any proof for that or are you just fear-mongering. I find it hilarious that you are commenting on this blog and declaring your own alarmist superstitious speculation.

Wacky progressive fear-mongering is the fraternal twin of science quackery. I wish you could laugh at yourself like I do, but unfortunately progressives/socialists/American liberals are unable to recognize their own hypocrisies.

Look, pea-brain, adaptation goes hand in hand with evolution. In fact adaptation causes evolution- ever heard of the Galapagos finches.

You mean my viewpoint, that as an atheist, people should be free to believe in whatever religion they want and that belief in creationism is totally compatible with the practice mainstream medicine?

I agree with the first one, but not the second. Belief in creationism undermines the very underpinnings of medicine, and ruins the doctor’s practice, since their beliefs become incompatible with medicine and in some cases, their patient’s lives.

As for Ron Paul..well, have you ever heard of Stockholm Syndrome? If he was the only ob/gyn in two counties, no wonder no one ever uttered a squeak. Plus, most women are totally brainwashed down there- they believe they merit every bad thing that happens to them because that’s what their pastor said.

Dude, I studied history. I know what fundamentalism leads to. You should crack open a history book sometime, instead of Ayn Rand’s terrible crimes against the English language.

I’m not a climatologist

That much is glaringly obvious. However, you seem to think you know more about climatology than the people who actually are climatologists and have studied the field for years. You have the same arrogance of ignorance as the anti-vaxers with their “Google PhDs”. Your arrogant anti-scientific anti-intellectualism shines through.

@Delysid #128

I agree with you about the scientific method of predicting and then experimenting to prove or falsify (OBVIOUSLY) which is exactly why climatology is far different from a field such as cancer research (which is far more repeatable and controllable than the study of the climate of entire planet).

I was responding to your claims that science is better at explaining things than predicting things. The point is that if a model is truly explanatory it will be good at predicting the future as well. Over the past few decades models of the climate have been very successful at predicting increases in average global temperatures and in predicting the effects of volcano eruptions.

As data become more accurate and models are refined I expect them to become more and more accurate. It seems vanishingly unlikely that this entire field will prove to be mistaken.

Climatology is looking at one huge complex system with billions of variables, which is why it is difficult to accurately predict the weather more than a few days in advance. However global warming has been happening for centuries and we understand it very well in terms of how greenhouse gases behave, and that if more heat enters a system than leaves it, it is going to get hotter. As far as I am aware no other model explains the warming we have seen over the past 30 years. There is some very basic physics underpinning this that isn’t going to suddenly change and surprise us.

It may be difficult to predict the precise consequences of global warming, in terms of local weather conditions, since there are likely to be complex systems that will be disrupted in unpredictable ways, as we have already seen. But global warming itself? I think we can be very sure indeed about this.

As an example look at Cox inhibitors. In theory they seemed so straight forward until the unexpected cardiovascular side effects starting occurring. Or on the flip side look at a drugs like rifampicin that unexpectedly treat conditions like Parkinson’s.

Some of the monoclonal antibodies that theoretically had the potential to be ‘magic bullets’ turned out to be a disaster.

Seriously? Because some drugs have unexpected side effects, scientists might be wrong in stating that if you put more heat into a system than comes out it is going to get warmer? That’s a very large stretch indeed for a multitude of reasons.

I’m not a climatologist, but it seems inevitable (and obvious) that we have a far better understanding of biochemistry than climatology just based on the nature of the field and the scientific community is still terrible at predicting outcomes.

Perhaps you aren’t very familiar with biochemistry. The more I learn about it the more I realize that don’t understand, despite having worked in clinical biochemistry for decades, and there is a huge amount of complexity and detail that we still don’t understand (look at some of the recent research for example). That doesn’t mean that we don’t have a good understanding of the basics.

For example if you give a patient lots of IV sodium and she doesn’t excrete it in her urine, her serum sodium is going to increase. It would be silly to suggest that some unknown mechanism could suddenly make the sodium disappear, just as it would be silly to suggest that some unknown mechanism could suddenly make all the CO2 or all the heat disappear, stop CO2 from acting as a greenhouse gas, or otherwise stop the Earth from heating up.

Also, just as conjecture, it seems that many of the people who go into climatology do it with the intention of ‘saving the planet.’ I can’t help but speculate that much of climatology is conducted with the intention of proving already preconceived notions about anthropogenic climate change.

I don’t believe that’s true. The current consensus on global warming has only formed over the past 30 years, and many climatologists have been in the field for considerably longer than that. For example James Hansen (who you accused of alarmism and political fear-mongering and who you described as an embarrassment to science earlier) was writing about the effects of greenhouse gases on Venus in the late 60s and 70s and appears to have been led to his opinions and fears about anthropogenic warming by the science and not by any ideology.

You on the other hand seem to me to have been led to conclusions that contradict those of thousands of scientists by your political ideology. The evidence for anthropogenic global warming is simply overwhelming and I am truly puzzled how any intelligent person can look at it and come to the same conclusions as you appear to have.

@ Denice:

Kook fight! Get your tickets now!

Free tickets for the first five comments posted on R.I.

I’ll bring the popcorn. What a combination Jake and Ginger make…both are pugnacious and both can’t resist stirring up the sh!t.

OMG…Jake is stating that Ginger and the entire Canary Party should be shut out of the Vaccine hearing that Jennifer Larson paid for.

“Now added to the long and growing list of reasons Canary Party should be shut out of the congressional autism hearings permanently is Vice President Ginger Taylor’s admitted bigotry against people with autism. Her willingness to dismiss them for their views is characteristic of the dismissals by Canary Party and affiliated groups pertaining to criticism of their activities within the months since the November hearing. Such bigotry compromises Canary Party’s entire leadership.”

I think the core of Mr. Crosby’s argument is valid.

Ginger is saying that his actions are invalid because Jake doesn’t have the “theory of mind” and “executive functioning” to see that his actions are causing pain to his ex allies. She didn’t say “theory of mind” or “executive functioning” but that’s what she’s relying upon

In other words, she’s substituting a stereotype of autism for the personality of someone she’s worked closely with for some time, in order to dismiss his actions.

“Theory of mind” is controversial enough on it’s own. But Jake doesn’t need theory of mind to understand that he’s pissing people off. They are telling him directly.

As to the idea that he can’t understand the longer term fallout (damage to “good work”)

“I WANT to believe that being this cruel, that making these poor choices are because of your autism, because you do not see the extent of the damage that you are doing to good people doing good work, and NOT because you actually realize how much harm you are doing.”

To me this reads that she doesn’t think that Jake can reason, doesn’t have executive function
http://www.ncld.org/types-learning-disabilities/executive-function-disorders/what-is-executive-function

It’s very clear that Mr. Crosby understands that what he is doing could have a major impact on the way the Canary Party operates. He states that he wants them to change. Ginger frames this as “how much harm you are doing” rather than face head on the actual criticisms he his making.

She’s clearly putting autistics in the back seat of advocacy.

Now–there’s the HUGE hypocrisy angle of all of this. They’ve accepted Mr. Crosby’s hit pieces for years, but they don’t think he has the executive functioning to understand the consequences of his actions? If she and the others at AoA and the Canary Party believe this, they were using Jake as a tool. Eiither they (CP, AoA and others) lack the executive functioning to realize the harm Mr. Crosby was doing to his reputation and his future employability, or they felt it was OK for them to use him as a tool, burning his bridges, screwing up his future and other fallout which she believes Jake is incapable of understanding. How exactly did they handle “informed consent” for Jake’s hit pieces? “OK, Jake, this is really good. I understand that you are incapable of understanding that this will hurt your ability to seek employment in the future, but we have worked that out and decided that the good outweighs the bad. Don’t worry your little autistic head, there. We’ve got your back”

This is bad on so many levels.

Matt, I think that is an excellent synopsis. Though I still can’t feel sorry for him considering the bigotry he has heaped upon other autists and his vile attacks on anyone who has criticised him.

Science Mom,

agreed.

@ Matt Carey:

I sometimes doubt that many of these people have the executive fx’ing themselves ( self-evaluation etc) in order to imagine what their own actions and written ideas have on THEIR own futures – let alone Jake’s on his.

Complete text of the FB exchange going on:

Jacob Lawrence Crosby:
Canary Party VP: “your judgement is compromised on this because of your autism”
http://www.autisminvestigated.com/canary-party-vp-autism/

Canary Party: “your judgement is compromised…because of your autism”
http://www.autisminvestigated.com
Canary Party Vice President: “your judgement is compromised on this because of your autism”
Like · · Share · 6 hours ago ·
Kelly Dunham likes this.

Michael Casadevall: Its amazing to me how people can write off something that they disagree with because they like who wrote it.

Know as the Assoication Fallacy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy

Also known as the “Hilter ate sugar” arguement. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HitlerAteSugar
6 hours ago · Edited · Like · 2

Michael Casadevall: That should be “don’t like who wrote it”. Note to self: don’t try and be smart before coffee.
6 hours ago · Like · 2

Jacob Lawrence Crosby: Exactly Michael, it’s so much easier to come up with excuses for writing people off than to engage them in any serious dialogue.
6 hours ago · Like · 2

Kelly Dunham: Good for you, Jake, for doing this. If someone had stated these things to her about her kid, or said ANYTHING derogatory about him, she (and the rest of the CP followers) would be up in arms.
4 hours ago via mobile · Like · 2

Kelly Dunham: And Michael . . . Never EVER try to be smart before coffee. It never works.
4 hours ago via mobile · Like · 1

Brian Hooker: Any such comment regarding individuals with developmental disabilities should widely condemned. We all have impaired judgment and myopic viewpoints in some way, shape or form. I am not less “impaired” than Jake just because my own “issues” are not public (in the way that Jake has bravely and openly discussed his). We all have issues and carry biases, period. To classify a bias based on a “disability” is indeed chilling.
2 hours ago · Edited · Like · 4

Lujene Greene Clark: Jake, this is what I posted on my fb wall. You may use it unedited as you see fit. I agree this Brian Hooker’s post above wholeheartedly.

For those of you writing me regarding Jake’s post in Autism Investigated, please understand that I am in no way associated with Autism Investigated and have no control over its content.

I am responsible for what I communicate, not the communications of others.

However, having said that, does not diminish the fact that Jake is TELLING THE TRUTH. Yes, it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Me, included. Heck, this whole mess makes me sick which is why I left the autism advocacy community ages ago. It is a vicious, back-stabbing, Jr. High cliquish mess! But, it is the truth and he has the right to express that in any forum he chooses. How you receive and interpret his words are between you and Jake. He is a meticulous researcher, dedicated advocate, intelligent and committed to the truth. His only agenda is to remove all obstacles to ending this travesty. You may disagree with his method; granted, it may not be how you or I would address the situation but don’t judge the messenger because you don’t like his message. He is frustrated, and rightfully so. Much like we get frustrated when
parents deny and ignore our warnings about vaccines because it makes them uncomfortable to see the ugly underbelly of the public health paradigm. That analogy hits a little too close to home, huh?

I agreed to turn over my research from NoMercury to Jake because I needed to walk away from all the foolishness (much like what Jake has described for months) for several reasons, not the least of which was Alan’s death and the ugliness much like Jake describes. However, knowing the information I had compiled (thousands upon thousands of documents) was so important, I wanted it to go to someone with the drive, intelligence and research skills to finish the vital work that Alan and I started over 10 years ago. I chose Jake…and I stand by that decision which has no connection whatsoever with his Autism Investigated project.

If you don’t like something *I* communicate then, of course, feel free to take that up with me. Don’t judge me by other’s words, opinions or actions. If you don’t like something Jake communicates, then address your concerns to him. He is an intelligent, principled young man capable of expressing and defending his own observations.

Many of you say we need to pull together because there is strength in numbers…which sounds great in theory. In that case, why not join with Autism Speaks because they have lots of money & people? See my point? I would rather stand alone and fight against the lies and self-serving agenda of Autism Speaks that is harming our community than compromise my integrity just to go along to get along. Which, in essence, is what you are telling Jake to do. Jake’s battle is no different and no less noble than our battles against Autism Speaks. HE IS TELLING THE TRUTH!!

We each are ultimately responsible for our own words and actions…including Mark, Jennifer, Ginger, et al.
about an hour ago via mobile · Like · 2

Ginger Taylor: Jake, I have responded to you in the comments several hours ago. Will you be approving my comments?
about an hour ago · Like

Brian Hooker: The CDC, WHO and Gates Foundation are working hard to stratify the U.S. population (as well as other countries) based on what certain individuals cannot do and where their weaknesses lie. It sickens me every time I see a company that wants to hire individuals with autism due to their ability to do repetitive work (What an insult!). By pointing out “flaws” in the thinking of individuals with specific challenges, we are playing into the hands of those who want there to be “thrifty, disabled working class” and those who advocate the poisoning of children for no other good reason. We can prevent a Brave New World scenario but it has to start within our own community.
about an hour ago · Like · 1

Alain #102, I’d say proceed with caution. I have been a target of antivaxxers for years, though I am just an innocuous parent of an autistic adult. They have tried to interfere in my relationships with work colleagues and even my office landlord! Last year one of my colleagues at work got a cranky letter from Jake Crosby’s Mom Nicole trying to get me in trouble somehow. Although the kookiness of these communications speaks for itself, it’s annoying for other people to get them just because they know you. Just something to keep in mind.

@ Anne, Denice, lilady,

Thanks for your advices and warning, I shall stay semi-anonymous.

Alain

Thank you for your post lilady,

The concerns listed on the CDC site are on the forms the customer fills out before they can be vaccinated. Even if the Pharmacist had a reason to think this customer would be one that should not take the vaccine (the customer has not been to our store for 15 years and she never even bothered to look him up in the system) wouldn’t she be duty bound to go forward and have him fill out the paperwork that asks them if they have these conditions?
She told him he had built up an immunity against it. He had it twenty years ago.
He ends up leaving our store, and if anyone in his circle asks him about the vaccine he will share his story with them. Don’t need it according to ….

A comment from Ginger on Jake’s blog:

You have a disability. The hallmarks of that disability are difficulty in seeing what is appropriate behavior, perseverating on things, difficulty putting yourself in another’s shoes, not correctly interpreting other’s emotions or intentions. I see all of that at play here. That does not remotely mean that I think that you should not be tolerated or that you should be dismissed out of hand.
[snip]
If your disability was physical, and I pointed out that you could not run fast because you had only one leg, and that should be taken into account when evaluating your physical activities, that is not bigotry. That is just a factual reporting of the impacts of a disability. So how is my opinion that your autism is impacting your perceptions/choices here bigotry?

Riiiiight, and never did she or any of Jake’s other handlers ever consider this while he was writing his hit pieces, stalking “enemies” and provoking interference with peoples’ employment. Suddenly his autism clouds his judgement but she’s not engaging in bigotry no no. The rest of her comment is a disgusting, manipulative mind fu@k of Jake.

@ Anne # 160: Jake’s mommy wrote a letter to your work colleague?

Jake’s in good hands now that his new BFF J.B. is posting at him …it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

@ I Rony Meter:

Sssssshhh! We’re not supposed to be saying that! Similar observations have landed Brian Deer into trouble.

But more seriously, if you look closely at how many of the regulars ( @ AoA or TMR) behave and explain ‘how the world works’, you’d be hard pressed to see where Jake is so very different from the mode- he’s just an extreme example of it- its full flower, so to speak.

They advocate self-serving, evidence-free theories of autism
They manufacture unlikely conspiracy theories
They place their own (quasi) knowledge above experts’
They harass SB scientists and governmental officials
( altho’ more subtley than Jake does)
They play act in public ( see Congressional meeting tapes/ esp Katie Wright)

They are in short, not paragons of either realism or diplomacy. They slander and libel scientists who do have realistic information. They e-mail critics’ employers. They attempt to broadcast their own ideas to influence parents without any thought of the consequences for other people ( i.e. infants, the immuno-compromised). And they used someone ( Jake) who was not quite as savvy as they, the leaders, were, because he could be beguiled into doing the more outlandish things that they wouldn’t stoop to themselves that would serve their puposes.

Now, they have another youngster, Natalie, who they do not use as an attack dog but rather as a ‘motion artist” ( or whatever she calls herself) in the creation of video propagand. However there, it is more a case of mutual use ( they use her, she uses them). In truth, Jake probably also though that he was using them as a staircase to fame as a journalist ( or whatever he calls himself). He could neither predict nor understand their MOs and they probably didn’t entirely comprehend or predict him, thus the conflict.

Mark,

It may be a flawed short-cut, but I have a rule of thumb that if the insurance companies are taking something seriously, so should I. Their whole business is risk mitigation. People tend to think of them as being about avoiding paying, but if they never paid out, they’d be run out of town on a rail; it’s actually more a matter of making sure they take in enough in premiums to cover the claims and still turn a profit. And to do that, they have to be able to accurately predict the claims they’ll get.

Lilady, indeed, Jake’s mom wrote to someone in the law firm where I practice. She accused me of making her look bad to potential customers and thereby harming her cash flow. Or something like that. It was odd, but not as strange as the one to my building office accusing me of terrorism. I have been in practice for a long time, people know me well, and nobody takes this stuff seriously. But for somebody just starting out, I wouldn’t ‘t recommend taking on this kind of attention.

Anne: Sheesh. Jake’s mom (among many others) makes an fool of herself in public and then blames someone else when she gets called on it.

I’m no scholar, but I’m unaware that there’s anything in the US Constitution or any of the amendments that guarantees freedom from getting one’s pwecious widdle feewings hurt.

@JGC – that “bottleneck” is now assumed to have occurred during the last “Super-Volcano” eruption….of which there are a few dozen that have been located around the world (Yellowstone now being the most famous).

We are one large catastrophe away from seeing large segments of the population die-off & it wouldn’t be very hard to see our current world transportation next shattered by something like that as well.

If doomsday does happen and great percentage of the world population is wiped out by our own climate activity, WELL THEN THAT WILL STOP THE ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM WON’T IT?

It’s all about control. It’s all about control of governments and other international bodies over the economy and people.

If Bangladesh or other regions become uninhabitable because of climate change, THE SOLUTION IS TO MOVE TO A NEW AREA. Permanent settlements are just imaginary human bias.Yet people seem to have to obsessive belief that everything must stay as it is. Vanuatu might someday be under the sea level? “OMG WHAT IS MANKIND GOING TO DO?”

I’m not a denier of the physical sciences. I’m not a denier that the climate is changing, as it obviously is always changing. I’m not even a denier that humans are contributing to the process with energy emissions.

I’m a skeptic of doomsday predictions about how biological life will respond to the changing climate.

I’m a believer that governments will devastate the economy in the futile attempt to prevent the inevitable, which may turn out to be not-so-bad, or possibly even beneficial in aspects, to begin with.

There have already been “unexpected” turnarounds in regard to climate change. Jungles are retaking over former cropland. Forests are beginning to thrive in higher latitudes. Nature is doing what it always does- adapting.

@Delysid – see, this is the problem….I don’t understand who spending the money to relocate hundreds of millions of people (and expect that countries will have no problem absorbing those people – because there has never been a problem, right?) is going to be less than what could be put towards solutions to the problem today…..

Progressives always have the same primitive, antiintellectual solution to every problem: “government will solve it!” The answer is always more taxes, more regulations, more central planning, more control. From the climate to have much pop you can order in one cup.

JGC – that “bottleneck” is now assumed to have occurred during the last “Super-Volcano” eruption….of which there are a few dozen that have been located around the world (Yellowstone now being the most famous).

Yes, the Toba super-volcano, which would certainly qualify as an apocalyuptic doomsday event. Part of the reason why I choose this near extinction event would be why the majority of the human population perished: rather than dying at the time of the eruption due to physical damage from the explosion itself or pyroclastic flows, they died over a period of time as the result of climate changes disrupting ecosystems, leading to crop failures, etc. (just as was seen on a smaller scale in 1816’s year without a summer following the 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora). Global warming is no less capable of causing such ecological disruptions.

We’re resourceful, bu delysid’s idea that we can of course survive whatever’s thrown at us is naive at best.

I’m a believer that governments will devastate the economy in the futile attempt to prevent the inevitable, which may turn out to be not-so-bad, or possibly even beneficial in aspects, to begin with.

Why do you believe:

That the government will devastate the economy?

That there are no actions we can take to ameliorate the impact of climate change?

That disruption of the world’s existing ecosystems could prove beneficial?

And finally, why do you believe that perserving the existing global economy is a more desirable goal than preserving the world’s existing ecological health?

@ Lawrence :

I do recall reading ( or hearing?) recently that the current situation is Syria might be related to drought after the displaced moved to cities from the rural areas.
Anyone know anything out this?

Hey, if [Syria] or other regions become uninhabitable because of [Civil War], THE SOLUTION IS TO MOVE TO A NEW AREA.

Right, Delysid?

I could go on and on. Keynesian economics and neoliberal economics poses as science when it is really just a pathetic attempt to justify socialism “scientifically.”

Is it your position that any economy that doesn’t take the form of a totally unregulated free market system constitutes a ‘devastated ‘ economy, delysid? Or do you agree that regulation in some form is necessary?

There are actions that can be taken.It’s in the news today IKEA is now selling personal solar devices that you can used to power homes and essentiall ge them off of the power grid.

What number of homes globally will need to convert to IKEA’s personal solar devices to cause any significant reduction in the rate of GMT increase? I’m sure you have this number at your fingertips. since you’re suggesting this represents a viable and rational solution to the problem, preferable to the enacting of economic incentives to reduce the anthropogenic contributors to climate change..

How much energy innovation has government supressed with senseless regulation?

I give up—how much?

A new nuclear power plant hasn’t been built in the US in decades. How can any person who is worried about climate change defend these regulations without exploding from this hypocrisy?

Nuclear power has the largest carbon footprint of any energy technology other than fossil fuels, both during construction (heavy machine plus tons of concrete and steel fabrication) and after during operation (large scale mining, transportation, converting Uranium to yellowcake, then to UF6, then enrichment, creation of fuel pellets, fuel rod assemblies, etc.)

Humans, simply by existing, disruput ecosystems. Once again, this shows the insanity of ecofascists…

Agreed, which is why we need to be aware of how our activities are disrupting ecosystems and take appropriate steps to minimize that disruption—for example, by reducing anthropogenic contributions to climate change.
Don’t you agree?

@ Lawrence:

Right.
Whilst I cannot go into my own economics because I have to get ready in leave in an hour or so, let’s just say, it’s not
Austrian, as you can probably guess.

Anyone else note: sid / Delysid? Meaningful? Coincidence?

See, here is the problem – people like Delysid don’t want to admit there is a problem, because it would require large-scale interventions by both private corporations and governments, working in tandem to alleviate some of the major issues we may have to confront….no one is saying, today, that we have to junk our cars or replace our petroleum-based economy – but that it would be a good idea to start looking at alternatives, because the fix today is going to be a hell of a lot less expensive than the fix tomorrow (when you’re trying to find homes for a few hundred million people).

Throwing up your hands and stating that the “Free-economy” will ultimately fix the problem is denying the fact that these economic forces only work when the world economy (and individual economies) are stable – we can expect that should there be sufficient changes to the climate which create more chaotic conditions (and dislocations of economic power), it will become nigh-impossible to do anything about it….don’t you agree?

@Lawrence

LMAO “No one today is saying that we have to junk our cars are replace our petroleum-based economy?”

Oh really? Maybe I hallucinated cas-for clunkers. Maybe I’m hallucinating Eco-checks every year for my car. Maybe I’m hallucinating coporate subsidies for solar power or strict limitations on off-shore drilling.

“You are exactly the type of environmental hypocrite that has spawned such passionate opposition. Wind and solar power require energy to construct, too, don’t they? Don’t they take energy go maintain?”

Yes, but their carbon footprint both during construction and during operation are far, far less than that of fossil fuels or nuclear power.

But hell, we must all obey your arbitrary worldview, right?

I’m not offering a worldview of any sort, delysid. You suggested that the construction of nuclear power plants could have mitigated anthropogenic contributions to climate change sufficiently that regulatory intervention would not also be necessary and I’m pointing out why that simply isn’t true.

The perfect carbon footprint is whatever you say it is?

Well, a ‘perfect carbon footprint would be a negative value, such that you were releasing less carbon than you sequestered and your day to day activities were not contributing to rising GMT.

But that’s not me saying so–that’s pretty much by definition.

If there is a problem, the worst way to solve it is force by government.

By what rational argument is this true, in 1) all cases in general and 2) with respect to climate change?

The more force it takes, the worse of a solution it becomes.

Why are you conflating “government intervention” with “force”?

Letting the market figure out solutions is the best way because it’s the ideas of 100′s of millions of individuals competing instead of the central planning by a few elites.

Excpet that those hundreds of millions of individuals aren’t competing to produce the best solution, or the soltuon that best serves all members of society, but instead competing to produce the solution that generates the greatest economic return on investment for themselves and/or their shareholders.

Do you see the problem there?

You end up with a solution such as “If there are floods the entire 300 million population of Bengladesh can just move somewhere else” being actually considered to be a ‘good’ solution.

Often, in a free society, many problems fix themselves. In most of the developed countries the population has a negative birthrate, for instance. People are voluntarily adopting solar power and other “green” technology. It doesn’t have to be forced.

@Delsyid – what I would say is that the money being funneled to those that constantly “deny” climate change is occurring & preventing any meaningful actions from being taken (either by government or the private sector) is distorting the very process that you believe will fix the problem (or at least alleviate it).

Admitting there is a problem is certainly not an invitation for massive government intervention – I’m certainly not advocating that position & I don’t believe anyone here has said as such either (hence the strawman in your argument), but that the continued denial that a problem exists is what is preventing the very discussion that should occur – as in, yes, we see there is a problem here, so let’s talk about the best means for tackling it…..

So, do you believe there is a problem related to climate change & that some effort should be made (either by the government or relevant private sector entities) to deal with the repercussions?

@Delsyid – except that Corporations don’t work in the best interest of anything but themselves and will take measures and means to distort the system to their benefit (hence the drive to “monopolize” areas of industry).

Libertarianism is as bad as communism when it comes to practice – because, in theory, they both sound fantastic….in practice, however, they deny human nature and don’t really work very well for the very reason that they are practiced by people with widely varying motivations…..(power being probably the biggest distorting factor).

In a perfect world, perhaps either or both could work beautifully, but in today’s world, both fail miserably when applied to the multitude of problems and human factors involved.

I just don’t know what to say about someone who thinks government shouldn’t regulate anything but is in favour of nuclear power. Nuclear power doesn’t work spectacularly well with regulation, and reverting back to Industrial Revolution social norms isn’t going to make that any better. Of course, I reckon he’s not old enough to know about the killer smogs in London, England, that somehow magically went away when the government passed the Clean Air Act there, or that for most of the history of humankind, water in cities hasn’t been fit to drink and yet now somehow it is…I wonder why?

The thing is, government is a voluntary association of people. If you don’t like the government you have, you can dissolve it, elect a new one, or even overthrow it. Taking government out of the equation at this point means the corporations take over, and you can’t unelect Microsoft, or get rid of BP’s environmental destruction by storming their corporate HQ and sending their upper management to the nearest guillotine (much though, if you watched what happened to the Gulf Coast and how hard BP’s fighting to avoid paying for the externalities caused by its pollution, you might want to…).

Also, if you want to eat pre-pure food laws food (and I’d direct you to Fast Food Nation if you want to see how bad things are with regulation), be my guest, but a) don’t include me, and b) don’t use any of my provincial healthcare when you get sick, either.

@Delysid:
Libertarians often say the best regulation is the “invisible hand of the marketplace”. If you study a little history, you see that the “invisible hand” is all too often an invisible thumb on the scale, one made up of money, power, and influence.
Libertarians also tend to oppose antidiscrimination laws, saying their businesses are their own property to run as they see fit. So under such a rule, if a business owner decides not to allow, say, Catholics into his store, and they insist on coming in, he can call the police. So there you get a substitution of the use of government power to enforce discrimination. Is that what you really want? Of course, with the laws slanted toward property over people, he might get away with just gunning them down if they get really angry at him. Sound like a fair solution to you?

@Interrblog

I am extremely impressed at how many blatant fallacies you squeezed into one post. Thanks for dropping in from ImaginationLand.

“The governmet is voluntary.”

This is an insane claim. Taxes are not voluntary. Regulations are not voluntary. This should be self-explanatory.

Your logic behind corporations is head-slappingly ridiculous.

Progressive logic: Corporations might screw us, therefore let’s make a powerful government that is far more unnaccountable, has prisons, to control them!

What brilliant logic!

Also, the FDA was not started because pre-FDA food was poison, but because Upton Sinclair, a muckraking communist, wrote the Jungle to draw attention to labor unions.

All you are doing is conjectural, manipulative, progressive fear-mongering.

WITHOUT GOVERNMENT CORPROATIONS WILL ENSLAVE US, OUR FOOD WILL BE POISON, AND THE EARTH WILL INCINCERATE TO DUE MARKET GLOBAL WARMING

@ Lawrence #210

Libertarianism works everywhere, everyday. Libertarianism is the belief in voluntary associations and ownership of yourself. Every time you purchase anything or even interact with someone that is libertarianism in action.

Communism can exist in a libertarian society (or under a libertarian government.) No one is stopping people from forming their own communes and not using money.

Libertarianism is not allowed to exist in a communist system (or socialist or whatever fasicst system the United States has turned into). Every one must obey. A libertarian community on which no pays income taxes or people disregard the other hundreds of thousands of government laws is not allowed to exist. The police come and raid it.

Libertarianism boils down to the following philosophy:

“I don’t wanna and you can’t make me”.

@lillady

Believe it or not I’m not Ron Paul’s clone. He has progressives foaming at the mouth to smear him as a racist so he is more careful about how he words things.

JIm Crowe Laws were GOVERNMENT ENFORCED RACISM. So yes, I fully support ending those laws as well as parts of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that went too far in the opposite direction.

The progressive secret weapon is to smear libertarians as racists, which is why every conversation includes this accusations, without exception.

I’m suprised no one has said “BUT WHO WILL BUILD THE ROADS?” lol

@dangerousbacon

Progressivism: “The government is the solution to every problem, taxing and forcing to obey my will makes mem a humanitarian, and anyone who disagrees with me is a racist.”

Poor Delysid…too ignorant to understand the differences between forms of government:

“Libertarianism is not allowed to exist in a communist system (or socialist or whatever fasicst system the United States has turned into). Every one must obey. A libertarian community on which no pays income taxes or people disregard the other hundreds of thousands of government laws is not allowed to exist. The police come and raid it.”

(Translation)

“I made my money and I don’t want to pay for public roads, fire and police protection, public schools, public libraries, grants and loans for college tuition in State universities and our infrastructure.

“Bring back George W. who tried to push through legislation to permit Americans to raid their Social Security accounts to invest in the financial markets. (Legislation for the little guys, which would not have benefited his pals on Wall Street//sarcasm…while the W’s fiscal policies drove the economy off the rails)”

“Elect Ron Paul, whose Presidency would have eliminated Income Taxes, Medicare and Medicaid and the Federal Reserve…because religious groups would provide for the indigent//snort.”

“Yeah, I’ve got mine and f*ck you all”

In NYC gangs that constituted the fire departments of the time used to fight for the privilege of extorting money from the owners who’s property was on fire.

If they weren’t paid, they would watch the property burn to the ground.

“Ron Paul didn’t write those things. Please try to be less dishonest.”

All of those remarks appeared in Ron Paul’s Libertarian Newsletter. Perhaps you could point me to subsequent issues of Ron Paul’s Libertarian Newsletter, where he issued apologies for not reviewing those quotations wrongfully attributed to him, in those Newsletters?

“Should Orac get blamed for my comments on Respectful Insolence? He’s the moderator, right? Give me a break and please try not to argue like Ginger Taylor.”

Orac used your cogent arguments against Ginger Taylor’s unscientific anti-vaccine stance. You decided to come here and start a flame war to advance your Libertarian unscientific agenda. Orac does not moderate Respectful Insolence with a heavy hand; he allows comments through posted by Bob Schecter a.k.a. Sid Offit…another science-illiterate and self-centered Libertarian.

Someone here is setting fire to strawmen and it isn’t me…

@lilady

I’m science-illiterate, hu? My soon-to-be DDS, MS in the biomedical sciences and BA in biology and chemistry must have been a fluke. I guess I don’t deserve my white coat.

I didn’t come here to start a flame war. In fact I’ve avoided commenting here because of the flagrant pretentious ignorance I see being spouted.

So you are saying Orac doesn’t moderate with a heavy-hand, just like Ron Paul didn’t moderate his newsletter? But that is different somehow, right? Who has time for rational arguments these days, imma right?

I hope Delsyid can recognize that his “skepticism” about the scientific evidence for AGW is based on the argument from consequences. He may fear taxes, regulations and all other forms of government intervention, but the proposed political/economic solutions to AGW have no bearing on the validity of the science.

Climate science draws on the same scientific principles and methods as all science. The motivation and the rewards for climate scientists are the same as for any scientist. It’s preposterous to attribute the overwhelming, worldwide scientific consensus for AGW to conspiracy, collusion and greed. If Delsyid can’t trust climate science, then he can’t trust any science. Can he really not see that?

Delysid: A free society depends on an ethical people.

How many of those have you ever met? On the whole, people are nasty, small-minded, panicky and stupid. I’ve met a few persons who were ethical, but in a crowd, individuality and ethics vanish.

@delysid – good luck arguing against the past few thousand years of human history…..your philosophy is great in theory, but you’ll never actually see it put into practice, thus your argument is fairly inane anyway.

@ Mal Adapted: Have you ever known me to post comments about Global Warming? I’m too smart to ever post comments about that subject, which I know little or nothing about.

Too bad, other posters here are too dumb to realize the limitations of their “expertise”.

@lilady

I went to a mix of private and state schools. My tuition is skyrocketed compared to what my middle class parents paid for college because of government intervention in college loans over the last few decades. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible. I also used the roads to drive to school. What is your point?

@Krebiozen

Sadly, the GOVERNMENT right now has the most guns and is full of people without ethics. Saying “without government blah blah blah” is pure conjecture, and that conjucture is undeniable reality of what is already happening with the government. Sheesh!

Delysid: You still are avoiding answering the questions I posed to you. There you stand, an about-to-be newly-minted health care worker who has benefited by public tax dollars for parts of your education, paid for by people who are childless or whose children who are grown and no longer in education programs.

What is the amount you have paid into the system in the form of property taxes, State and Federal Income Taxes for the coddled lifestyle you lead?

Cripes, I despise wise-ass twenty somethings who are totally clueless, who come from privileged backgrounds and who blather about AGW, our government and the ACA.

Well, I believe that markets, science and government all have dogs in this fight, be it putting the brakes on climate change or providing essential services. But that’s because I have my head firmly upon my shoulders.

And that’s all I have to say about that.

We now return to your regularly-scheduled political argument, already in progress….

Benefitted from public tax dollars? Priviledged background?

LMFAO. My education has been a waste in many ways. DDS is an obstacle to the profession more than anything else. I despise middle-aged limosuine liberals who think their age justifies their political ignorance. I’m screwed by government far more than I benefit from it.

If you support the ACA then you understand jack-shit about economics. You are not even qualified to be voting.

Do you realize that the prices of healthcare have skyrocketed because government handed health care to insurance corproations? Have you heard of the HMO Act of 1973? This is not the free-market. Governmetn is driving up the costs with endless reglations and laws. HIPAA, COBRA, the HMO Act of 1973, Medicare Part A-D, Medicaid, the ACA, the FDA, the EPA. Every one of these agencies drives up costs and efficiency.

I might be a 20-something, but you are floating around in LaLaland. Just because you are middle-aged doesn’t mean you know jackshit about economics.

Oh yeah, and I pay taxes. I’ve worked for 10 years, from teaching tennis, to tutoring organic chemistry, to pulling up dirty carpets and toilets. Rigth now I’m a dental school which is a freaking disaster.

Every limosuine liberal should be forced to practice dentistry in a dental school so they can truly see a bureaucratic nightmare in action.

Anthropogenic climate change and the associated proposals for governments around the world to massively intervene in the economy to stop it is not comparable to the “gaps in evolution arguments.” Once again, evolutionists are not trying to predict the future of evolution. A fair comparison would be that “the climate has never changed and God created the Earth as it is.”

I could make a lot of objections to your supposed refutation of my analogy (do you think all fields of science which make predictions about the near future are invalidated by the fact that evolution scientists don’t try to predict what course evolution will take in the millenial timeframes it generally operates in? Or is it only those fields where you perceive an economic ramification?)

But I think the more telling thing is, you didn’t respond at all to the other point I made, about the anti-vaccine crusaders who try to claim that the proposition “vaccination saves lives” is somehow in doubt because they can point to some things which are not known, such as exactly who would catch the disease and die from it if not for the vaccine. Your argument is in the exact same form: “Because your science can’t answer every possible question in exacting detail, it must be that every aspect of your prediction is in doubt. Iin such doubt, in fact, that my opinion as someone who isn’t even in the field is just as good as the scientific consensus among those who have studied this field their entire lives.”

We may not know who would die from measles if we stopped vaccinating and just let it run wild again, but there is no doubt that approach would lead to deaths. There is no reasonable doubt that an unrestrained approach to releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has already led to climate change and will continue to do so if unchecked; the fact that questions remain such as “exactly how bad will it be?” and “have we already reached the point of no return?” does not put all the rest in doubt.

I feel like I’m constantly in the Chicken Little and the Sky is Falling folk tale whenever I discuss this issue.

To be honest no one gives a crap what you “feel”. People “feel” all sorts of things and mistakenly present them to us as if it has some power to convince us that they’re right. Advocates of so-called “biomed” approaches to “curing” autism constantly whine about how they “feel” the scientific establishment ignores the “cures” they’ve accomplished because those “cures” would somehow prove things the establishment doesn’t want to hear about vaccines being responsible. But their “feelings” on the matter mean absolutely jack and Shin-ola about what the truth is.

People are contradicting each other just trying to defend the alarmism on this thread. Extrordinary claims require extrordinary evidence, and the evidence that human activity is going to devastate the world is not there. IT’S SPECULATION.

STOP SHOUTING, THANKS. And frankly, you are wrong. Neither the proposition that we can royally f*ck up our life as we know it if we alter our climate, nor the proposition that industries all over the globe casually pumping gasses into the atmosphere that alter how much of the heat that reaches our planet is retained can alter the climate is all that extraordinary. Given what we know, the truly extraordinary claim would be that we can do just what we like, including pumping out greenhouse gases full-tilt if that’s what the Great God Free Market tells us is good, and nothing bad could possibly result from it.

As someone pointed out, we have only existed on this Earth as a blip on the scale compared to dinosaurs, yet scientists supposedly know with undeniable certainty how crops, humans, oceans, and the rest of nature is going to react?

That’s not even a sequitur. “Dinosaurs were around much longer than we were, therefore it’s perfectly reasonable to think that there’s some mysterious buffer force which will perfectly compensate for everything we’re pumping into the atmosphere so that we’ll never suffer any consequences we don’t like from it”?

We live by the rules of thermodynamics, as someone else pointed out, yet we are supposedly pushing climate to unprecedented levels? Which one is it?

The fact that you actually ask that, as if those two statements somehow didn’t go together, shows just how very much you do not understand the science.

Sorry for spelling errors,- objections punctuation and the rest.
Working seven days in a row this week.

@Delysid:
First, taking on your snide “people like you” comment, you don’t know what kinds of person I am, and to pretend that you know the first thing about me from a handful of posts here is pretentious and obnoxious. I hope you don’t make such remarks to your patients when you’re in dental practice – or on further thought, maybe I do.
Getting back to substance, “If a place business wants to kick me out because I am an atheist, I fully support their right to do so. It’s pretty stupid for them because they are losing out on my business.” How many white people in this country regularly refused the business variously of Jews, Catholics, Latinos, African-Americans, American Indians, etc.? Did any one of them ever moan that about lost business? And what happens if that business is the only pharmacy in town and the next one is fifty miles away and will close before you can get there? What happens if the local undertaker won’t bury your relative? What do you do if you pull into the first open hotel you’ve seen for miles and they chase you away? How about the gas station that won’t sell you any gas, leaving you stranded? What if it isn’t just one business, but every single one in town? Do you want to be the only person on the tour bus who has to sleep in the bus or the pool shed, or have someone with you bring your meals out to the car? The evil of discrimination in public accommodations is far greater than a little or even a lot of annoyance to the business owner or operator. Think those days will never come back? Try traveling around this country as a Sikh or a Muslim or a Chassidic Jew.

Did you all know that the the head of the IPCC is not even a scientist? Thanks for this debate. I was unaware of the hilarity that the head of IPCC is an activist and economist.

Also, here is an interesting list of science-illiteral quacks to browse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming#Scientists_questioning_the_accuracy_of_IPCC_climate_projections

@Delysid,

I’m in canucksland (Quebec to be exact) and my healthcare is that way:

1-: annual visit to the primary care provider for my synthroid. I schedule the appointment 2 month in advance.

2-: a visit each 5 weeks to my shrink. He give me my appointment each time and I show up 30 minutes in advance.

3-: last was the surgeon for the appendix removal. Appointment was over the phone with the appointment center. Wait time (after surgery) was 6 week.

As for myself, I’m 6’1″ 164lbs and I walk 7.2 km (4.5 miles) each day and looking to do more. I also do some stretching.

Alain

@Lawrence — a life without regulations and driven by the free-market? Somalia comes to mind.

I think it’s quite apparent now that Delysid found his way to the correct side of the vaccination question purely by accident, as on any other subject he cannot think his way out of a paper bag.

Anyone, on any side of any issue, can spew out argument-shaped objects in the form “Oh, no wonder you cling to that idea that I can’t actually refute meaningfully, it’s because you’re a closet Red/have a messianic ‘save the world’ complex/can only find comfort in slavish adherence to the status quo” – et cetera, et cetera, ad hominem, ad hominem.

But if you claim to understand the science, and then demonstrate that your understanding of science is so poor that you think thermodynamics somehow makes it not possible for climate to change – you just sank your own chances of being taken seriously.

@Anteaus Feldspar

Are these quacks, too?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_scientists_opposing_the_mainstream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming#Scientists_questioning_the_accuracy_of_IPCC_climate_projections

“[m]y objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have.” Freeman Dyson

“LMFAO. My education has been a waste in many ways. DDS is an obstacle to the profession more than anything else. I despise middle-aged limosuine liberals who think their age justifies their political ignorance.

I agree. Your education has been a waste in every way. It’s been a few years since we allowed barbers to practice dentistry.

“I’m screwed by government far more than I benefit from it.”

Sure, sure, *Big Government* has screwed you. How much income tax did you pay last year…or during any year?

“… it should not be surprising to see hordes of former Reds, or of those who otherwise would have become Reds, turning from Marxism and becoming the Greens of the ecology movement. It is the same fundamental philosophy in a different guise, ready as ever to wage war on the freedom and well-being of the individual.” George Reisman”

Well, I’m not too surprised that you follow the editor of Ron Paul’s Libertarian Newsletters

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LewRockwell.com

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. I’m not baiting you, that was a sincere question and it’s not about what can I afford now but more, where do I get the money to pay for my education. Mind trying again?

Alain

@ Delysid,

The government solution here was to put a cap on tuition cost and at the moment, Quebec’s cost are the lowest in Canada. See http://www.securivm.ca/2013/04/only-in-quebec.html

Since then, I started to do some research and found a few states which had very low fees (comparable to the rate found in most provinces) for native from the states but I haven’t updated my blog post to reflect this.

Alain

The blog post apply to any program except the MBA’s from McGill and Concordia university.

Alain

@Alain

Canada has a different system that I’m not as familiar with as the US.

Generally speaking, Canadians pay for these ‘low tuitions’ in many other ways. You are still paying for it, just not directly. Again, this is government decieving you.

The price of living is quite a bit lower in the US than Canada.

http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_result.jsp?country1=Canada&country2=United+States

Delysid: The reason we have governments and rules is precisely because people can’t be trusted. They need structure. The neighborhood watch (lynch) committee is not a stable form of government, and cannot and should not be trusted. Rules endure longer than people do, and are less susceptible to bending.

As for vaccines- why would you rail against something you’re going to get anyway? My mother works in healthcare, and if anything, is grateful for that rule, as it doesn’t cost her anything but a little bit of time.

Finally, you do know that those regs and rules about dentists that you dislike are the main things keeping dentists in business. If they were all unregulated, most of them would be like Adams and the natural news crew- quacks. People wouldn’t bother with dental care. Something to think about, if you are capable of that.

Seriously people we are starting to argue AGW politics ? Give me a break and stick to the medicine.

The list of scientists that oppose global warming theory that Delysis links to, is the usual assemblage of inexpert has-beens, cranks, sellouts, and compulsive contrarians. None of them have put forward an argument against the consensus that actually holds up to scrutiny.

@Krebiozen

So what you are saying, paraphrasing, is that “if I don’t vote I have no reason to complain, and if I do vote I have no reason to complain?”

What lovely anti-intellectualism? So because I love in a democracy I just have to accept what my government does as just? I’m jealous of people like you. It is stressful being burdened with rational thought. I wish I could be like you and just decide “who needs to think because the government does it for me!” The funniest part about this is that when Republicans or non-socialists are voted into office, people like you are screaming from the rafters about how they aren’t respecting the will of the people. Talk about cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.

All of your fear-mongering about the market is conjecture. The failure of the state is an undeniable reality. How are you are on a science blog with such ignorance reality?

And about this “my childlike fantasy in the market.” Give me a break.

“It constantly amazes me that the defenders of the market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions.” Lawrence Reed

Once again the statists here are showing their identical genes to the biology quacks.

It’s magical thinking and false attribution. “Everything great that happens in our society happens because of government. The market would enslave us.”

You have basically admitted that you are so enamored by the State that you cannot even envision anything being done any differently. “The government is the alpha and omega. The government is the provider of wealth and prosperity. The government is the answer to all of society’s problems and there is no other way.”

@Krebiozen

You are speaking of government more fanatically and dogmatically than even the most intense worshipers of religion. Socialists worship the State with so much vigor that opposition to the State is deeply offensive. “How dare you question the democracy!”

But I should appreciate the government I live under because it’s worse other places, right? Nice logical fallacy.

You are so deep into the circular argument that the government is the alpha and the omega you can’t even pretend to think outside of the circle.

Wow.

@lillady

Belief in personal freedom and responsibility is childlike, right? Questioning arbitrary authority is juvenile.

Adults have total dependence on the government, right? Adults know and trust that the State will make the best decisions for them. Adults don’t question authority or dogma. Adults believe what and do what they are told. Adults accept the system because it has good intentions. Adults proclaim that it is heresy to oppose the greatness of the father, the God, government. Also, Delysid is a racist, right?

I never thought I’d hear Krebiozen being accused of not thinking for himself.
Live and learn.

Like a said childlike mentality.

Meanwhile, when Ron Paul said “let them die” and was cheered on by the Tea Party sponsors of that Presidential Debate…Paul clarified his statement:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/tea-party-debate-audience-cheered-idea-of-letting-uninsured-patients-die/

”

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Tea Party Debate Audience Cheered Idea of Letting Uninsured Patients Die
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By Amy Bingham
@Amy_Bingham
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Sep 13, 2011 1:48pm
gty ron paul dm 110913 wblog Tea Party Debate Audience Cheered Idea of Letting Uninsured Patients Die

Republican presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul speaks during the presidential debate sponsored by CNN and The Tea Party Express at the Florida State fairgrounds, Sept. 12, 2011 in Tampa, Fla.

If it was up to Ron Paul, or many of the Tea Party audience members at Monday night’s GOP presidential debate, churches, not the federal government, would help foot the bill for the medical costs of America’s 50 million residents living without health insurance.

CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer’s hypothetical question about whether an uninsured 30-year-old working man in coma should be treated prompted one of the most boisterous moments of audience participation in the CNN/Tea Party Express.

“What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul responded, adding, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk. This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…”

The audience erupted into cheers, cutting off the Congressman’s sentence.

After a pause, Blitzer followed up by asking “Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?” to which a small number of audience members shouted “Yeah!”

Paul, a doctor trained in obstetrics and gynecology, said when he got out of medical school in the 1960s “the churches took care of them.”

“We never turned anybody away from the hospital,” he said. “We’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves or assume responsibility for ourselves. Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it. That’s the reason the cost is so high.”

Ron Paul is right…the neighbors, our friends and the churches will pick up the slack…but only in Texas.

According to census data released Tuesday, the number of uninsured people rose by about 900,000 from 2009 to 2010, bringing the total number of people living in the United States without health coverage to 50.9 million, or 16.3 percent of the population.

Texas, where GOP candidate Rick Perry has served as governor for more than a decade and Paul has served as a U.S. Congressman for more than 20 years, has more uninsured people, as a percent of population, than any other state. In the Lone Star State 26 percent of the population does not have health insurance, according to census data compiled by the Kaiser Commission on Medicaid and the Uninsured.

Delysid,

So what you are saying, paraphrasing, is that “if I don’t vote I have no reason to complain, and if I do vote I have no reason to complain?”

You live in a democracy, so you have a right to complain all you want. You also have a right to campaign for the political party you prefer, or even to start your own political party or to stand independently. Ain’t democracy great? In many parts of the world you would be shot for expressing the opinions you have expressed here.

What lovely anti-intellectualism?

What anti-intellectualism is that? I have studied these subjects in great depth at university, as well as having traveled to countries around the world. I’m basing my opinions on my education and experience. I am not anti-intellectual.

So because I love in a democracy I just have to accept what my government does as just?

You stated that having an elected government is equivalent to being ruled by those who have the most guns. It isn’t. I didn’t say you have to like it, I pointed out that you live in a democracy. If you don’t like it there are measures you can take to do something about it, very unlike the military dictatorship you claimed it is identical to.

I’m jealous of people like you. It is stressful being burdened with rational thought. I wish I could be like you and just decide “who needs to think because the government does it for me!”

That’s nasty. Wherever did I state any such thing? You appear to be losing your grip on this discussion.

The funniest part about this is that when Republicans or non-socialists are voted into office, people like you are screaming from the rafters about how they aren’t respecting the will of the people. Talk about cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy.

“People like you” – there’s a phrase that launched a thousand pogroms. You know nothing about me, or how I vote. I’m not American so I don’t vote Republican or Democrat. If I vote for a politician who breaks his/her pre-election promises I will complain, of course. How is this hypocritical?

All of your fear-mongering about the market is conjecture.

It isn’t conjecture, and you repeatedly claiming it is won’t make it so. I spent a year studying the anthropology of economics which looked at all the major western economic models as well as the way things work in different cultures, so I think I understand the subject reasonably well – I passed my university exams on the subject with distinctions if that means anything.

It seems clear to me that what people describe as a “free market” simply means a set of rules around exchanges of good and/or services that give them an advantage over others. It’s as simple as that.

The failure of the state is an undeniable reality.

The failure of the state to do what? Failure compared to what yardstick? Which specific state are you talking about and where is your evidence that a country without a government is anything other than a military dictatorship or a free-for-all for organized criminals?

I think you should spend a bit of time in some African or Asian countries. That might change your mind about how successful North American and European governments are.

How are you are on a science blog with such ignorance reality?

I think a lot of us are asking ourselves the very same question about you.

And about this “my childlike fantasy in the market.” Give me a break.

If you’re going to use quotation marks please quote accurately. I wrote:

In contrast your, “Letting the market figure out solutions is the best way”, appears to be based on a childish utopian fantasy.

If this isn’t just a fantasy, where can I see it in action? I can point to numerous historical examples of collapsed government leading to military dictatorship or lawless chaos. Where’s your evidence of libertarian free market bliss?

“It constantly amazes me that the defenders of the market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions.” Lawrence Reed

Reed was talking about education in that quote. We have a free market in education, more or less, in the UK. What it means in practice is that only those with money get the best educations, which is why there are so many Old Etonians in the British government. Having known a number of people from that class, and their disdain for the poor and the working classes, I don’t think this is a good thing.

I’m certainly not satisfied with government making promises and expressing good intentions. I don’t trust government to perform properly without a boot constantly up its rear end. Government needs to be held to account by the people if it doesn’t fulfill its obligations. Democracy takes work to function properly – people need to get involved. Complaining and building ridiculous, utopian, libertarian fantasies is just hot air.

How are you involved in your local community and in making sure your government keeps to its obligations Delysid?

Denice,

I never thought I’d hear Krebiozen being accused of not thinking for himself.
Live and learn.
Thanks [blushes]. Truth be told I have probably wasted far too much of my life “thinking outside the circle”. I have read lots of libertarian and anarchist literature over the years. I even used to describe myself as a libertarian for a while when I was in my 20s, before I had learned a bit about the world, through education, travel and talking to people from a wide range of backgrounds. In other words until I grew up a bit.

In my opinion the idea of living without anyone to tell you what to do is essentially a childish one, especially since we have so many examples of what happens if we try to live without rules. It’s a sort of rebellion against authority and society instead of joining in to see how things can really be improved through participating in government. I agree with Delysid that politicians “are just people”, but so is “the free market”, so I don’t see why he is so afraid of one but not the other.

I wish things were otherwise, I really do. The idea of everyone accepting “personal freedom and responsibility” and everything being lovely is very appealing, of course it is. However you only have to look at the world (organized crime and wars for example) to see how that would work out in practice. Go to Delhi and see how millionaires in mansions live side-by-side with people literally starving and dying in the streets.

Even if the majority of people do believe in “personal freedom and responsibility”, as I’m sure most people here do, there is a large minority of people who do not. What do you do about them? Once you start locking them up or shooting them, or even figuring out how to decide which ones should be locked up or shot, your utopian libertarian society is on its way to hell in a handcart.

JGC,

He rejects the notion the free market “winners” have any obligation, ethcial or otherwise, to ameliorate the suffering of the losers to any extent.

I think (hope) he believes that people’s personal responsibility would lead them to help a neighbor who was starving. That often doesn’t seem to work in practice.

I think that part of the problem in India is a widespread belief that people have been born into the life conditions that benefit them, and that interfering is meddling with ‘the will of the gods’* and not really helping. We humans are good at rationalizing horrible behavior.

* I suspect that’s also why driving standards are so awful there, as there is a fatalistic belief in divine will, and no amount of skill or care will affect that.

Damn! Clipboard error–haven’t had that in years.

Should have read:

I think (hope) he believes that people’s personal responsibility would lead them to help a neighbor who was starving.

maybe I’m doing him an injustice, but my guess is the principle he espoused @207 (“How about Bangladesh solves their own problems, eh?”) would apply to neighbors as well.

(Note to self–keep better track of what you’re arguing about and where in the future.)

Delysid, so let me get this straight. You see Sciencebloggers as playing the racist card when their views are not backed up by logic and evidence with respect to the issue of government control, yet, when some of us who have questions about vaccine safety/efficacy- let’s say the issue of children in developing countries being given mercury in their vaccines when it has been mostly discontinued in North America, or what about oral polio causing many cases of NPAFP in India – they throw that racist crap at us? Are you so special?

THE MARKET IS US. The market is hundreds of millions of individuals choosing the best way to do things. It is not an organized bureaucracy of a few hundred or few thousand people making decisions on behalf of millions. It is millions of individuals making decisions from the ground up.

Where have I heard something like this before? Oh yeah – “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”. We all know how well that worked out.

Jen, by ” being given mercury in their vaccines when it has been mostly discontinued in North America”, you’re actually referring to individuals receiving vaccine formulations from multi-dose vials which incorporate Thimerosal as a preservative, correct?

Surely you’re aware that ‘thimerosal’ and ‘mercury’ are entirely different chemcial entities, and that there is no scentific evidence whatsoever indicating exposure to thimerosal as a result of immunization poses any detectable health risk?

I did NOT say thermodynamics makes climate change impossible.

Your reading comprehension is terrible.

I’m saying that the doomsday predictions seem to counter-act the concept of thermodynamics.

And again, no one who actually knows thermodynamics even knows why you think thermodynamics is somehow incompatible with effects of global climate change that anyone with a functioning conscience (and brain) would certainly call catastrophic. But now that I’ve seen that your idea of a solution to “Entire nations become uninhabitable” is not “do what we can to prevent that scenario” but “let them move somewhere else” I’m not sure there’s any point pretending you have a grasp on this whole “reality” thing.

I apologize to Orac and everyone here, with the obvious exception of Delysid, for my rant, #297. While I meant every word of it and I suspect others agree with me, I lost my temper and engaged him at his level.
So to move my part of things to a slightly higher level, here’s a short list of a few things that American government has done well.
1) The Tennessee Valley Authority.
2) The National Defense/Interstate Highway System.
3) The Louisiana Purchase and the Alaska purchase.
4) Multiple exploration expeditions: The Corps of Discovery, the Ex-Ex, the Byrd Expedition, Apollo, Cassini, Skylab, the ISS, the Mars Rovers.
5) The unprecedented and stunningly successful mobilization for World War 2 including the Civilian Pilot Training Program, the Zero Defects initiative, the Manhattan Project, and much more.
6) The GI Bill of Rights.
7) The transcontinental railroad system.
8) The Land Grant colleges.
9) The Civilian Conservation Corps.
10) The continuing cleanup of our air and water.
11) The National Parks system.
12) The Panama Canal.
13) The US Postal service – laugh if you want, but consider how much they do and how well most of it is done how much of the time and ask yourself if you could design a better system that does the same.
14) The National Weather Service – more joking aside, private enterprise could never have delivered so much information for so many purposes to so many people at the same cost.
Some of these things were purely government-conceived and -run; others were private-public co-operative efforts. Each of them was a stunning success that changed the nation and the world.
Not everything government has done has been so successful, but each of these is something private enterprise would and could never have undertaken alone, or accomplished quite so well. All of these have had results both good and bad that were not conceived of when they were started, except the GI Bill, which was an unqualified success. This list is of course not complete, not a detailed discussion, and there is much else I could say about them and more. But these are indisputable successes.

Dave:

6) – the GI Bill. Hear, hear.

And oh yeah, the market does mail service better than USPS as well. Heard of a company called FedEX?

The market does everything more efficiently, cheaper, and of higher quality than government. Everything. The private sector is even taking over for NASA.

From PubMed, and similarly CDC, FDA and USDA:

“Due to the lapse in government funding, PubMed is being maintained with minimal staffing. Information will be updated to the extent possible, and the agency will attempt to respond to urgent operational inquiries.”

Then FTC: “Unfortunately, the Federal Trade Commission is closed due to the government shutdown.”

“Due to the Federal government shutdown,
NOAA.gov and most associated web sites
are unavailable.

Only web sites necessary to protect lives
and property will be maintained.”

Well, we will soon be living in your libertarian utopia. Though it would have been helpful if we knew of other countries that were doing it successfully.

@AdamG

NASA’s scientist are moving to the private sector, so yes. It is going to take time, obviously, but the private space industry will develop if there is a demand.

@Chris

The government is failing. There is no “libertarian utopia.” That is you trying to use the nirvana fallacy.

@Everyone

The free-market is not a bureaucracy and it is not housed in the White House or the Kremlin. The free-market is not a magical being or an “invisible hand.” It is not a shadowy group of people promising to make all of your dreams come true (while robbing you). This is the fantasy of government being projected to the free-market.

The free-market is us. As such, the market is everywhere, all the time. It is 300 million people interacting, serving each other, competing with each other, and prospering.

Whenever people attack the free-market they are almost always falsely attributing everything they hate about government.

@AdamG

Ask Orac how much he enjoys begging for government grant money.

There is resarch and development being done in the private sector. Did you know that the first sequencing of the human genome was done privately by Celera?

A lot more private research could be done if the governmetn did steal trillions in taxes from society every year.

Also are you aware of crowdfunding? That seems to be gaining steam.

Have you heard of crowdfunding?

@ Delysid,

I’m agnostic and I don’t have any political leaning except, my experience was better with leftish policies: grants for school that I don’t have to pay back; but, I am willing to be converted. Keep in mind that I won’t let my skepticism at the door but here, I offer you a really fair occasion to convince me. The offer still stand.

What would help me is an education as either software engineering or industrial engineering. Okay? Under the socialist regime, I get grants that I don’t have to reimburse and in the process makes some peoples extremely jealous (my psychopath ex-flatmate among other. He didn’t want to pay taxes for me). Under a libertarianism regime, what could I rely on to get financing (and I’m okay if it need to be repaid).

I’m not asking you to base your judgement on canada or Quebec, just imagine I live in Louisville, KY for the exercise, or Silicon Valley while you’re at it; I do plan to make a part of my career in the state.

Clear enough?

Alain

Delysid, while you were busy condescending, you failed to notice that I said the list was far from comprehensive.
The Postal Service? I can send a letter from Key West to Kodiak for the same price as to the next zipcode over and I can trust it will get there. They go everywhere every day (yes, I know, exceptions, but they are minor), and failures are unusual. If the bizarre requirement that USPS has to fund its pension system for seventy-five years in advance, it would work even better.
Our regulatory system is the envy of many countries around the world. Our regulations support private enterprise. If you buy a fleet of trucks for your company, you can usually trust that they are made to a certain standard of safety. Order beef for your restaurant, and it has been inspected. Your house has more than likely been built to code, and your neighbors are not permitted to do things with their property that are dangerous to you, or that seriously inconvenience you. I have been to places where the people and their businesses have only the protections and assurances they can buy or bribe. Want to live like that?

@Chris

You mean like Orbital Sciences Corporation?

Or AccuWeather?

@Chris

The US government is the largest and most powerful entity in the history of the world, and it has unlimited money which it can print and tax from the people. Of course a private company is going to have a hell of a time competiting with the Federal government when it directs serious resources to a project. Give me a break. The governmetn has way more money it can use to start enormous projects. This isn’t even a debate.

Orbital Sciences Corp. just launches.

AccuWeather is a media company, and gets its data from the National Weather Service and other government paid entities like the military.

Exactly how many weather satellites do they own? Provide links.

@Chris

No governments Chris. No governments are satisfactory for me. If I wanted to start a project, don’t you think it would be a lot easier if I robbed you, Orac, Khani, Alain, Dave, and everyone else in this thread and used your money to do what I wanted? Then if I ran out I could just rob you all again. Or I could have the Federal Reserve send money into my bank account.

That power doens’t make the government better! It makes it worse. But this gives it the ability to fly into space faster than the private sector. The private sector doesn’t have the power to steal.

@Chris

How many private companies have tanks and fighter jets and nuclear weapons and mass murder people around the world? Name one. Let’s flip this around. Tell me.

@Delysid,

It seem to me you don’t actually read our comments? It also seem to me you haven’t developed a theory of mind worth a grain of salt about all of us too? Robbing us? Keep dreaming in color.

Alain

@Alain

I’m trying to read the comments. Different people keep saying the same things over and over. I’m suspicious that no one is reading my comments.

A “libertarian regime?” What does that mean? The whole point of libertarianism is that you are free in your own pursuits and there is a governmetn controlling the market.

Did you read the long post I sent you about the cost of educatin and why it skyrocketed? Before government intervention it used be easy to work your way through school. I sent you a link in which Peter Schiff talks about it for 15 minutes with sources. I already answered this question for you. School used to be affordable.

Well, t’was interesting speaking about politics and balloon filled with hot air but this distract me from a good project of porting google’s map / reduce and a number of goodies to a Parallella cluster which I’ll buy soon.

Alain

@Alain

The solution is to dismantle Sallie Mae and get the government out of student loans. It’s a no-brainer.

@Orac

You should have done something with smoking or HIV. The NIH seems to love throwing millions of dollars at those causes. One of my profs has a 1.5 million dollar grant to study the effects of smoking on gingiva. Like we don’t know enough about that, yet. There has been enough money sent to HIV research in that it equals 10 million dollars or so per amino acid of the HIV virus.

I figured getting private money would be more difficult than NIH honestly. The point I was trying to make is that the NIH isn’t exactly the conveniance of a drive-thru when it comes to grant money.

@delysid: WHEN was it possible to go to college with just help and a part-time job? Certainly not in MY memory, my parents’ memories, or my grandparents. Easy to work your way through school? Not likely. Not unless your parents had savings bonds, loans they didn’t tell you about, and a lot of other helps. My grandmother had to quit college when the stock market crashed. My grandfather only finished college- and medical school – with a lot of loans, family gifts, and working nearly full time during school PLUS full time or more during vacations. And professors then – and now – got paid a lousy wage.

My dad and his brothers had it a little better – children of professors got reduced or no cost tuition. And they lived at home, so no dorm costs. So their college educations only cost book costs.

My mom and her brothers had WWII savings bonds and some savings to go on. Also scholerships, loans and family scrimping and savings.

I don’t know WHERE you got this idea of college utopia. Try reading real letters and talking to people.

I’d thought, at first, that you were intelligent as you were pro-vaccine. Then the libertarian/anti-government in all things came out. You’re so young, child. You will learn.

Orac: “I like begging pharmaceutical companies for money even less. ”

With the added bonus of being accused of being in the pay of Big Pharma, and therefore a “shill.”

And since tax funded research funds are bad, and then it is bad to be paid by Big Pharma, I assume that there exists some universe where all research funding is from charitable donations.

@MI Dawn

Believe it it goes both ways. I see science blogs and get excited about smart people, then I discover it’s a bunch of progressives and socialists, fraternal twins of biology quacks. College was never free. Relative debt was less for college graduates, but it was never a utopia. This seems to be a favorite of the commenters on this blog, the nirvana fallacy. Defend the government at all costs and from all failures- hold the market to utopia standards.

@Chris

Every government across the world is too authoritarian. I guess that means you win! We live in your government utopia, right? Or are governments too small and weak for your liking?

@AdamG

What you don’t seem to understand is that government succeeding still comes at the price of freedom. Any money it spends it has to take from others. Government doesn’t produce wealth. It redistributes it.

I think I”m done with this thread. I’ve never commented here before because I was rolling my eyes about the continuous progressive-circlejerk, and this exchange has just confirmed it.

“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.” Bastiat

Delysid: “Every government across the world is too authoritarian”

Ah, again with the generalities. Of course, it also shows that along with forgetting American history and government in high school, you don’t have a clue on what happens in the rest of the world. I hear Somalia has very limited government, and has some nice beaches.

Plus I have lived in South and Central America where the government was often either bent over backwards to comply with the wishes of those with money, or was trying to wrestle back some kind of control from the oligarchy (one has gone totally wacky socialist in the other direction and that is also not good). Sometimes the “free market” includes some folks hiring their own private armies. Guerrilla warfare in the city is something most American kids don’t have to deal with.

By the way, my high school chemistry teacher was murdered by the thugs of one of those country’s dictators. They were a “fun” bunch.

You really don’t have a clue. Though you might be interested in this comic.

Gee, you mean Haiti, which was ruled for decades by left-wing dictators is worse than Chile? People are confusing left-wing dictatorships with “no government.” Somalia was ruled by a left-wing dictator for decades as well. Governments destroy these countries, yet it’s always anarchy or the market that is blamed. It’s the endless circular argument of false attribution.

How about we use the United States pre WWI as an example? It had an extremely weak federal government and yet become a world super-power. The greatest prosperity in the history of the world developed thanks for what was the most free economy in the history of the world. No central banks, no universal health care, no other savage socialism.

So now that there is no government (left or right) to speak of in Haiti and none at all in Somalia for several years now, how come a functional libertarian society has not managed to evolve?

You seem to be forgetting that the US did not become a prosperous superpower until after (and because of) WWII. In 1939 our military ranked 39th (after such mighty exemplars as Portugal and Finland).

Delysid, are you serious? The Duvaliers were “left-wing” dictators? Your definition of left-wing must be more stretchable than Silly Putty.
The libertarians keep telling us that when the free market is established everyone will act out of enlightened self-interest and we’ll have an Earthly paradise. It’s the exact mirror-image of the Communists – all the bad stuff will go away once “true communism” is established. Or the Salafists – we just need everyone in the world subscribing to the same austere brand of Islam. All of it completely ignoring human nature, which will somehow undergo a complete transformation if we can just get this house of cards built and stable. In the meantime, anyone who acts contrary to the supposed ideals is dismissed with the “no true Scotsman” fallacy – “no true libertarian/communist/Muslim/what-have-you” would ever behave in such a way”.

Thanks for the link to the comic Chris – I thought the repeated use of “Collectivists” was a tell for something, now I know what. I also find the use of the term “progressives” as a pejorative hilarious. Delysid and his ilk really do want to roll back progress and are extremely anti-utilitarian.

I wonder why Delysid resents government funding of research on HIV so much?

His arguments against AGW parallel those used by creationists right down to the list of “scientists” (which includes the a bunch of MDs, Dentists, Engineers, Veterinarians etc.) who “dissent” from the consensus.

Delysid – you accuse us of being ignorant of economics – how many university economics courses have you taken? I took 4, (macro, micro, and 2 Petroleum Economics). As for thermodynamics, I suspect you think a Rankine cycle is something that an “ecofascist ” is trying to force you to trade your car for.

@MI Dawn

You’re so young, child. You will learn.

– one can only hope.

Back to the topic of vaccinations: http://news.yahoo.com/vaccine-refusal-contributes-whooping-cough-outbreaks-113017436.html

Looks like vaccine refusal contributes to outbreaks. Who knew.

…And people have still not answered my question re: historical attempts to establish a libertarian government in a country and the results thereof. If there were any, menioning the results would be germane to the argument already in progress. (And maybe would settle a few things….)

Lucario, I think the closest this world has ever come to a functional utopian society could be found in the Shakers.

Pre-World War I America? Child labor? Raw sewage and industrial pollutants dumped directly into tidal creeks and waterways? Unsafe working conditions, often resulting in disasters like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire? Racial discrimination at every level of society, etc., etc.?

That’s your model for a working libertarian nation?

@JGC: “That’s your model for a working libertarian nation?”

Well, that’s not fair. We just didn’t give market forces sufficient time to work out the kinks. Snirk.

I do love the “savage socialism”. Like it’s a rampaging free-range bear.

Also, “greatest prosperity” is absolutely hilarious. Prosperity for who?

I don’t think Delysid would feel any change to society was necessary. If someone wants hire children there should be no impediments–if the chidlren don’t want to work 12 hours a day for 7 cents an hour in unsafe conditions they can simply find work elsewhere. If someone wants to refuse to sell to or serve members of racial minorities they should be allowed to do so without penalty (see delysid’s post @217).

I think this really is an example of the society Delysid yearns for, where the central principle is “I got mine, Jack!”.

Krebiozen:

Not only does everyone know everyone else’s business, they know it for four generations back.

Those who do not know history are doomed to make jackasses out of themselves in front of those who do:

Catherine Young and Family
Workforce, 1913
Cannery Row, 1913
Meet the Mauros, 1911
Breaker Boys, 1911

“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Besides—excuse me—I don’t know that.”

“But you might know it,” observed the gentleman.

“It’s not my business,” Scrooge returned. “It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!”

The 90% tax rate myth.

http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/21/krugmans-twinkie-defense/

Also I can’t help but notice how liberals love to be in majority opinion, as part of the mob. Groupthink and conformity is very exciting. I’m suspicious that this is why collectivists despise individual liberty- it’s a deep, innate and primitive desire to be a part of the pack. Collectivists view the government them- as safety in numbers.

I dare one of you to go debate a group of libertarians away from the inevitable circlejerks in these blogs.

Also to the people who keep bringing up Ayn Rand: LMFOA. Because Ayn Rand is the goddess of libertarianism right and everyone agrees with her about everything?

All people are doing is attacking personalities and characters instead of the libertarian ideology itself.

But then again progressvism is a mishmash of hypocrisies that is intellectually undefendable without using a barrage of logical fallacies. Ad hominum, strawmen, circular reasoning, poisoning the well, majority rule, and every other logical fallacy that can be spewed.

Wow it’s been a while since a hard-core Paultoid showed up here (where have you gone, Grandma Marsha…?) Nice try at a citation there Delysid, but Tucker Carlson’s vanity website isn’t exactly an unbiased source. You might as well cite the Washington Examiner or WorldNetDaily.

I’m going to refrain from comment since I can see it will be misinterpreted/ignored like everyone else’s, and just post a link to the far more knowledgeable Thomas Frank: http://www.salon.com/2013/10/02/reaching_for_the_pillars_the_conservative_plan_is_sabotage/

“I dare one of you to go debate a group of libertarians away from the inevitable circlejerks in these blogs.”

Well, from what I can tell in order to be a good libertarian, you have to disregard all history that disagrees with what you want it to be.

And the Ayn Rand comic was just an amusing side note. My favorite depiction of her and her fan boys was written by Tobas Wolff in his book Old School. You, by the way, are projecting the same attitude and image. It is the very epitome of group think, yet you think you are being oh so original. It is actually quite amusing.

The government does not create wealth. The market creates wealth.

This line gets trotted out all the time, and I’ll be damned if I can find any sort of semantic payload in it. What is this quantity ‘wealth’, W? What are its properties, aside from not being conserved? Is it monotonically increasing, or can it be destroyed? Are the operators ‘create’ and ‘destroy’ completely independent, rather than having a well-defined functional mapping? Was there a time such that W(t) = 0? At which it was undefined? What is its ontological status? Can it exist in isolation, such that it can be distributed to me and I will still have it if I cease to engage the market? If not, where does it go, and how does it get back from there if I return? Etc., etc.

Delysid – Thomas Frank also had a column in the Wall Street Journal for a couple of years. Is the WSJ part of the great Collectivist Conspiracy too?

And BTW, Frank started out from ideological roots very similar to your own – he just went in a different direction. No wonder you’re afraid to read it, he’s got your number.

@Delsyid – so, please enlighten us as to any area on Earth, in human history, where your “ideal” was ever put into practice & proved to be successful?

There’s always the Republic of Minerva and other seasteading communities, which were sooooo successful.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Seasteading

Somehow, I don’t think Orac and Narad would be interested in leaving the United States, but perhaps the Random Dude would be.

@Lawrence

I’ll ignore you condescending fallacy and still answer your question.

What society started libertarian ideals?

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Guess what. It failed. The Constitution and the Republic failed to uphold limited government. Now we have the most massive government in the history of the world.

Now progressives cheer the failure of libertarianism by the existence of the current massive State by defending the existence of the State because libertarianism would fail. The irrational “logic” is ridiculous.

@lilady

Every one of your comments reminds me of the following Winston Churchill quote.

“The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”

It terrifies me that you vote, but it makes me giggle that you think your emotional gibberish is “rational.” Rationalpedia is about rational as naturalpedia is scientific.

You still have not answered #394.

What society started libertarian ideals?
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Congratulations, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve read today.

But never mind that, you’re all gung-ho to have a substantive discussion, so let’s have at it.

Which of the following areas should the government be involved in?

– Military
– Intelligence gathering
– Firefighting
– Police
– Health care
– Worker safety
– Minimum wage
– Drug policy
– Freeways
– Energy infrastructure
– Transportation safety standards
– Science
– Pollution cleanup
– Education

Condescension. Ignorance. All the hallmarks. Delysid, please tell me you’re young. Please tell me you’re just trying out all them nifty tactics you just learned in debate club.

It terrifies me that Delysid who is somewhere between an undergrad degree and a DDS degree, doesn’t know the difference between Communism, Socialism and Fascism.

It terrifies me that Delysid cannot name any country where Libertarianism or partial Libertarianism has ever been implemented…no less….has ever been successful.

It terrifies me that Delysid needs to hang out on that blog mainly populated with science illiterates, AGW and AIDS denialists, 9-11 Twooothers, Birthers, general conspiracists and other assorted losers, in order to feel good about himself. (BFLPS-Big Fish Little Pond Syndrome)

I’m delighted Delysid is old enough to vote for the Libertarian and Tea Party candidates, so that Democratic candidates will win during the next election cycle.

Delsyid sounds a lot like the old Communist Revolutionaries….thinking that their “theories” will lead to a utopian ideal.

Unfortunately, when putting those theories into practice, they proved to be incorrect.

Once again, show us where your theories have been put into practice and been successful?

Because, otherwise you are arguing nothing but hypothetical nonsense.

I was going to keep out of this but some of this is just painful to read.

Also I can’t help but notice how liberals love to be in majority opinion, as part of the mob.

I never realized I was part of a liberal mob before, and I’m pleasantly surprised that I seem to be in broad agreement with most people commenting here. However the lone voice ranting about group-thinking sheeple who have been brainwashed and unable to think for themselves seems strangely familiar.

That is how government works.

Good grief. A fantasy about how originally everyone lived in an idyllic free market until some evil deceitful person came along and ruined it all with the idea of a government. Based on my studies in social anthropology this is absolute nonsense.
What is closer to the truth is that early hunter gatherer societies such as Delysid describes were (and in some cases still are) more like socialist collectives with everyone contributing as they were able and sharing the proceeds. Sharing is almost universal in small and ‘primitive’ societies. It is the idea of personal property and profit that destroyed this idyllic state, not the idea of government.

Even the simplest hunter gatherer societies have some form of government, in the form of rudimentary rules, and ways of making decisions about where and when to hunt, how to defend against neighboring tribes, who and who not to trade (externally) with etc..

Orac, I think they should be in none of those things. I’ve answered this already in other comments.

I’m an anarchist but I could settle for a nightwatchman state, similar to what was intended during the creation of the US government.

I would support a system that allowed an emergency volunteer military without a standing army, like Switzerland has.

I don’t support any government involvement in healthcare (not even state licenses). I do support private governing bodies and boards to uphold medical standards. I’d like to see medicine go back to more of an apprenticeship system.

I abhor the War on Drugs more than any other issue. Every drug should be legal. The DEA (and ATF) should be abolished tomorrow.

The FDA should be abolished as well. Dangerous pharmaceuticals were not the reason for the creation of the FDA, but for meat packing inspection due to public outcry from the communist fiction book The Jungle.

The market already builds the roads through private contractors. All the government does is tax and contract the work out. The government does not need to be involved in roads. The market has tremendous incentive to maintain roads for commerce. In private residential areas in Ohio the roads are perfectly maintained, then when you pull onto public roads they are full of potholes. This is government at its finest. The question should be, “without government, who will neglect the roads?”

The private sector is capable of doing fantastic science work, even fundamental science. The statistical T-test, for instance was developed by a statistician working in Guiness Brewery. I don’t think government should be dictating the money flow in research.

Orac check out the public available grant allocations of the NIH. A lot of the projects are embarrassing. Many, if not most of the most important scientific discoveries did not occur in massive publicly funded universities. Marie Curie and many of the other physicists at the turn of the 20th century worked in home laboratories. Other monumental discovieries such as PCR were made in corporate settings.

There should be no minimum wage. This is basic economics.

Believe it or not I do support government involvement in pollution as far as it involves property rights violations. A factory doesn’t have the right to pollute on the land of someone else. I don’t support hairbrained schemes like carbon taxes, but factories should not be able to just dump chemical wastes into rivers.

Think about how much wealthier every American would be if they won’t paying astronomical taxes. Elimination of the income tax alone would give every middle class American tens of thousands of disposable income.

Prosperous societies indulge in the arts and sciences. It’s human nature. There is no doubt in my mind that if the trillion dollar shitshow burden of taxes and regulations of the Federal government was lifted off of the American people the sciences would reach another golden age.

Denice,

didn’t they used to open for the Clash?

The Intellectual Lynch Mob would be a great name for a band. Now you have triggered my literalist nostalgic reflex – it was the Slits and the Innocents who opened for The Clash when I saw them for the third time back in ’78 in a small venue on their UK Give ‘Em Enough Rope tour* – I was right at the front, close enough to touch Paul Simenon’s bass while he was playing, which made him snarl.

It got so hot Joe Strummer poured several buckets of cold water over all of us at the front, which was nice except when I got outside in the sub-zero temperatures afterwards my jacket froze solid. Happy days.

* I came across a bootleg of that very same gig not long ago – it sounded terrible. I guess you had to be there.

Khani:

What evidence would convince you of anthropogenic climate change? Or that people should halt climate change regardless of whether they caused it? What are your criteria?

I had high hopes for Delysid initially, based on his acceptance of science-based medicine and of evolutionary biology. His rejection of AGW isn’t mysterious, though. He’s employing the argument from consequences: if AGW is true government intervention seems inevitable, but that’s abhorrent to him, so AGW can’t be true. He’s also relying on the argument from ignorance: that is, a simple lack of knowledge about how science is done by working scientists, and of how the scientific understanding of AGW has developed over nearly 200 years.

While “It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of a thing he was never reasoned into” (Jonathan Swift), simple ignorance ought to be correctable. I’m going to make one more try, since lurkers here may benefit even if Delysid can’t.

If I’m asked to recommend one book for educated laypeople who want to get up to speed on the topic, my answer is The Discovery of Global Warming by Spencer R. Weart of the American Institute of Physics. It’s published both in paperback and online. Dr. Weart was trained as a physicist but spent his career as an historian of science. The book is a highly readable work of historical scholarship, not partisan polemics. Anyone who reads it understands just why the notion that AGW is a vast hoax is ludicrous.

Krebiozen – you apparently had way more money than I did in ’78. I was in the cheap seats (sometimes behind the stage) for Queen, Chicago, Jethro Tull, and U.K. if I recall correctly.

Now, Delysid, that’s a very reasonable question, but you answered it with smartass comments instead of substance. One might think that you don’t have substantive answers.

That and the lack of solution for my case tell me we should just ignore Delysid. If all I get for answer is to keep questioning the government, then it’s the worst of the outcome. At least with my party, we carry actions to benefit the world around us.

Alain

And that’s what I’m trying to get out of this conversation, Shay. I’ve asked twice about historical attempts at establishing a libertarian society, just to get proof (or not) of concept. Just to see if such a society was feasible. What I got was an example of the closest thing to a utopian society. Two entirely different things.

I wish someone would answer my original question re: historical attempts at establishing a libertarian government and their results. That would be nice, and I would thank whoever did it in advance.

(Forgive me if I sound a little huffy.)

Denice,
Fear not, I’m not Derek, and I don’t have dish water blonde hair. You got the height right though, spookily.

M.O’B.,
I worked weekends as a petrol pump attendant – ‘pumped gas’ – so I had a little money, but I don’t remember it being an expensive gig. It was at the now non-existant Wirrina Stadium in Peterborough (that’s a sad photo), November 30th 1978, apparently the “Sort It Out Tour” not the “Give ‘Em Enough Rope” tour as I recalled. It was a standing gig in a smalll sports hall, with no seats as I recall, just a stage about 4 feet high at one end, so I was literally inches away from the bands.

My usual venue was the Corn Exchange at Cambridge, a roller skating rink, also with a similar stage. I always got there early and got a spot at the front, and often had a large bruise across my midriff the next day from getting crushed against the stage by the pogoing mob.

I saw lots of punk bands there, The Damned many times, The Undertones, The Ruts, to name a few. Even Gary Numan when he was with Tubeway Army and called himself Valerian, and was nearly booed off stage. Iron Maiden briefly once too, walked in at the end of the gig when the door bouncers had disappeared…

I still much prefer small venues. The other two times I saw The Clash were at Rock Against Racism gigs in London, one in Victoria Park the other at another park, and at both they were more or less distant specks with thousands of people in between me and them. At the first I could barely hear them due to another punk band playing on the back of a truck nearby. I’ve only been to one big stadium gig – I had to sit down! Never again.

historical attempts at establishing a libertarian government and their results.

Let’s start with the US, say 1870-1910.

(Mod, aside): thank you for dequeueing that so quickly, Orac. Sympathy for the loghorraeic? 🙂

Stu @ #430:

“Let’s start with the US, say 1870-1910.”

Yeah, but the Gilded Age (I assume that’s what you’re talking about) was a highly successful time for the US. How could it possibly be “libertarian”?

Are you saying libertarian governments can be successful?

check out the public available grant allocations of the NIH. A lot of the projects are embarrassing.

Thank goodness you’re here to decide for us! Because remember, your opinion is the only one that matters. If only there was a system through which experts of differing opinions could all get in a room together and vote on which opinion is the best. Wouldn’t that be something?

In your magical golden age of art and science, what force keeps scientific discovery open and accessible to the public? You only need to look at the case of Myriad to see what happens when corporate interests get involved with science.

Lucario: “Are you saying libertarian governments can be successful?”

Until the folks who are providing the bulk of the labor rose up and say that they would not be abused anymore! The tenant farmer no longer needs to give the bulk of his crop to a absent landowner. That children need to be in school learning how to read, write and basic math instead of tending looms or going into mines. Or dealing with the company store.

Delysid seems to have really slept through his American history classes. That is funny since it was required to pass this class when I was in high school over thirty years ago, And for my kids to graduate just about a year ago. How did he manage to skip that requirement?

It appears that Jake’s Facebook page has been invaded by his new BFF, J.B.

Some pals you have friended, now that you’ve shat upon all your former colleagues at AoA.

https://www.facebook.com/AutismInvestigated

Oh, the paternal system, where doctors pretty much decided which students would advance based on who they were related to and whether it would bring the doctors social and monetary advancement?

@AdamG

You are missing the point so blatantly that I don’t know if you will ever understand. Read this comment very clearly.

The entire point of my libertarian worldview is that I am not deciding for you. I am not in a position of government, I am not taxing your income and then using the money I took from you by force to decide on what science projects that money is being spent on.

This is why the current system is so offensive. If I was a science bureaucrat and I used your tax money to study shrimp on treadmills, would you be happy? If I took your money by force and then used that money to study penis size of homosexuals versus heterosexuals (actual study), would you be happy?

Wouldn’t you prefer that money is spent on something that you think is important?

If you do not understand the difference between central planning by force and voluntaryism in the market, I don’t know how else to say it. I just feel sad and frustrated by the ignorance I see around me.

Commenting on this blog has been very disheartening. The pseudointellectualism and arrogance on display here is depressing.

Voluntaryism versus authoritarianism is not hard to understand. Those who believe in pseudoscience in the libertarianism movement might frustrate me, but their ability to reason through political issues is so superior to the savage pro-authoritarianism socialists around here that I don’t know whether to laugh or sigh.

The worst part about all of this is that those who worship the government are the most likely to participate in government. Progressive socialists are like the dumb kid in class who is the first one to raise their hand to answer every question and who is the most eager to become class president to make decisions for everyone else.

Again, only one person in this discussion is claiming “absolutes.”

Voluntaryism versus authoritarianism is not hard to understand.

Of course it isn’t. I don’t think many of us would disagree that a voluntaryist system would be wonderful. In an ideal world all forms of human association should be voluntary, and no one would have to be coerced to do anything, because everyone would accept personal freedom and responsibility and sign up to a social contract.

What you appear to be incapable of understanding is that many of us simply don’t believe this would work in practice. This is why we think you are extremely naive, since it is blindingly obvious to most of us that many people do not accept personal freedom and responsibility, or if they claim to, they do not behave as if they do in practice.

We have asked you for any examples, historical or current, where a libertarian system has worked in any large organization, such as a country. You apparently cannot offer a single example.

Chris, @ #438:

“Until the folks who are providing the bulk of the labor rose up and say that they would not be abused anymore! The tenant farmer no longer needs to give the bulk of his crop to a absent landowner. That children need to be in school learning how to read, write and basic math instead of tending looms or going into mines. Or dealing with the company store.”

Funny, that’s not how I remember the Gilded Age ending. I thought it ended in a more peaceful manner – with a more gradual changing of the guard.

Then again, I mostly paid attention to the more dramatic moments of American History (which is a lot, let me tell you!) and glossed over the not-so-dramatic parts.

You quote this as of immense importance:

As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all.

Yet over and over people have asked you how X (whether that’s defense, policing, education, healthcare, road-building or whatever) would be provided if not by government, and your only response has been either to ignore the question, or to mock the strawman that anyone here is asserting that government is the only way to do anything, or that we are incapable of even considering the possibility.

What we want is some idea of what your libertarian utopia would look like in regard to providing a variety of Xs, and some evidence to support the claim that this would work better than government doing this through taxation.

How do you deal with those too ill to work, to poor to afford health care, who fail to save money for old age, who get addicted to the freely available addictive drugs in your utopia, who steal from others, who teach their children dangerous nonsense, who plot to kill others, who invade your country with an army, who refuse to pay for a road but now try to use it etc. etc.?

If you don’t have ready answers to these questions, perhaps you haven’t thought this through very well, and perhaps your libertarianism friends aren’t quite as superior in reasoning as you claim they are. This is strongly suggested by the pseudoscientific nonsense they come out with in regard to vaccines. Are such unbalanced reasoning abilities (in both the libertarians and in commenters here) really very likely, or could you have inadvertently become a True Believer of nonsense?

This is how engrained the collectivism is. This is exactly what I’m talking about when I commented about the mob behavior.

A delusional psychotic friend of mine talked in similar terms about how he was right (he believed his father had been replaced by the CIA, and that he had discovered a new mathematical theorem) and how the rest of us had all been fooled.

Are ad hominems about mob behavior all you’ve got?

Child mortality was also sky-high, the poor we’re left in the streets to die, famine was still common in some industrialized nations, etc.

Again Delsyid show us a practical, real successful application of your philosophy, because I’m not going to just take your word for it that it would work.

To all, I would recommend reading “Jennifer Government” as a better example of where Delsyd’s thinking takes us in the real world.

@ Alain:

I believe I advised you to try to accumulate courses and skills which would allow you to be employed along the way and that weren’t dependent ONLY upon getting the degree: you probably are already doing that to a great extent.

I would talk to the Specialisterne reps and tell them about your prior application to the trade school. Don’t think that wanting to accept one opportunity necessitates rejecting the other. I’m sure the agency/ company understands your situation and would value you getting more computer studies. I doubt that they’re going to fold up their tents and leave town within a year- they have a long range plan, n’est-ce pas?. Just be honest with the interviewer/ advisor. There might be a way for you to be involved with them in the future or on a part time/ rotating basis.

I think that showing them how hard you’re trying to study on your own initiative speaks well for your self-reliance and sincere interest in education. You are also someone who doesn’t need money to live and doesn’t really have to work but who *wants* to work- that also speaks volumes.

* Bon chance*

@Lawrence

I’ve been trying to decide who the most anti-intellectual commenter on the blog is, and I think you win. “Hey read this fictional novel to understand libertarianism.” You are like the anti-thesis to Ayn Rand. Hey Lawrence, if you want to understand a free society, read Atlast Shrugged! LMFAO

You know how I know the government fails? REAL LIFE. The evidence of the failure of government is literally everywhere.

For example, right now I’m sitting here trying to nativigate the mountains of paperwork I have to do just to treat a Medicaid patient. HIPAA policies arbitarily change every week it seems like. I calculated it out and I realized that I’m paying almost 300 dollars a day on 8% interest (thanks government) just to be in dental school to spend most of my time filling out paperwork.

In other comments there seems to be a lot of confusion regarding medical education. Anyone who thinks that the American medical education system is anything other than a disasterous clusterfuck either has not been through it or is delusional.

If I could drop out of school and work for private dentist as an apprentice for the remaining 18 months of dental school and get my degree, as a message to the world that I am competent, I would do it today.

Also thanks for the sensationalism that you are bringing to the conversation. Someone in another comment even called me a “monster.” How high into imagination lalaland does one have to float to consider anyone who opposes government a monster?

Not all libertarians are the same. Only a fringe minority of libertarians are antivaxxers.

I’ll take your word for that, though that has not been my experience. The whole reason Orac mentioned you in his post was that it is so unusual to see a nut job saying something sensible, to put it bluntly.

Most antivaxxers are left-wing nutjobs (who no-doubt vote Democrat.)

Most of the serious antivaxxers I have come across seem to be right wing, often libertarians, who distrust governments on principle and believe there is some sort of conspiracy to poison everyone to bring about a New World Order with a reduced population.

I beolieve there are some left wing antivaxxers who tend to be dippy hippy New Age types who believe in the power of positive thought and juicing, but I haven’t come across many of them.

By bringing up the irrationality of antivaxxers all you are doing is discrediting the people who share your ideology.

Interesting – what do you think my ideology is? I don’t know any left wing antivaxxers, I have never met any, so I’m having a hard time seeing how I’m discrediting anyone but idiots by labeling them as such.

Again, for the 5th or so time, by attacking a “libertarian utopia” all you are doing is using the nirvana fallacy. I never once hinted that free-market is perfect.

Yet another straw man. No one is attacking your utopia, we simply would like some idea of how the damned thing is supposed to work in practice!

Some problems are eternal to mankind. A free society is the best way to deal with those problems; it’s not a perfect cure.

Again, where is your evidence to support this assertion? Why do you believe that a “free society” (whatever that looks like) is the best way to deal with those problems apart from blind assertions that look to me exactly like religious dogma. “Government is bad because it’s bad, any idiot can see that, and if you disagree with me you are all brain washed progressive left-wingers, because i say so!” That seems to sum up your position.

So what is your excuse of government? The burden of proof is on you. Has the government fixed poverty? Has the government fixed unemployment?

Compared to what? People in the developed world are better off than anyone has ever been throughout human history. Life expectancy is longer, infant mortality is lower, people’s likelihood of dying from violent crime or being sent to war is lower. Poverty as people understand it in other parts of the world does not occur; even in America I don’t believe people starve to death.

Personally I’m not convinced that unemployment is a bad thing. I would like to see more and more work done using technology and people to have more and more leisure time. That would require finding ways to redistribute wealth more equally, probably using taxation.

There are a lot of things that your and my governments do that I don’t much like. I don’t see the solution is to get rid of them completely, I think we can change our governments so that they truly work for us as they are supposed to.

Also child labor is not necessarily a bad thing. Farm children all grow up as child laborers. This is why schools are not in session in the summer.

I’m talking full-time child labor with no education and no childhood.

My Dad delivered newspapers as a paid child laborer at 12 years old.

Probably most of us worked in our spare time as children. I certainly did, all through my education I worked weekends and vacations. That is not what I’m talking about here.

My Mom worked on the family farm her entire childhood and as secretary for a factory at 15. I worked as a tennis pro at 16, the earliest feasible age in which I could drive myself to work.

You have not the faintest clue what childhood used to be like for most children until governments made rules about it, do you? Telling me that child labor is a good thing beause your dad delivered newspapers? Words fail me.

That brings us nicely to Orac’s post today, which looks at the political spectrum of nut jobbery in the form of AGW denialism and conspiracy theories of various degrees of implausibility.

@Delsyid – you keep claiming that what we have now is bad & there should be an alternative, yet you show no evidence that your “alternative” will be better than current…..so answer the question, please point to where your philosophy has been attempted & succeeded in the real world?

Because I can point out exactly why Communism is bad & doesn’t work – because we have real world examples of where it was attempted & has universally resulted in worse outcomes (and certainly not the outcomes that the people preaching for it claimed would occur).

So, show us your evidence.

@Lawrence

The burden of proof is on you. You have to defend how government works. Tell me how minimum wage works better than no minimum wage. How has the Fair Labor Standards Act helped society?

How has Medicare and Medicaid helped?

Those programs have no been around forever. I don’t have to defend the market as if it is some theoretical fantasy. The market is the default. You have to defend government.

Go ahead. Defend every program that you think is necessary. I’ll be here waiting, during my mountain of paperwork.

@JGC

Please help Lawrence defend each and every government program and agency that you think is necessary. Please prove actual evidence of them working and not just their feel-good intentions and positive names.

The burden of proof is on government. Go ahead. Take your time. The bureacuracy of governmetn is enormous, so I imagine defending all of them will take quite a bit of time.

So no, it does not intend to actually defend any of its stances. How droll and typical. I think we’re done here.

Lucario: “Funny, that’s not how I remember the Gilded Age ending. I thought it ended in a more peaceful manner – with a more gradual changing of the guard.”

Far from it. Ever read about the Pinkerton strike breaking tactic? Have a look:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/sfeature/mh_blue.html

… and more violence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everett_massacre

Gaah, blockquote fail. Please bring back preview or introduce an ‘Edit’ button.

The burden of proof is on government.

No, it’s not. The ‘government’ didn’t post to this forum insisting it’s the best possible system: you posted to thsi forum that all governments are bad and should not be involved in anything (including ensruing the public health, maintaining essential infrastructure, regualting food and pharmaceuticals, etc.), while claiming that a completely unregulated free market system would be far more beneficial to society.

Your claim, your responsibility to credibly support it.

And you haven’t even made an attempt to do so. You’ve been asked many times to explain exactly how your libertarian free market society would function in the real world, or to provide examples of such societies that have functioned as well or better than the current democratic republic, and you just keep repeating some version of “All government is bad!””

Why is it, exactly, that you’re unable to respond substantively to direct questions or to admit you have no answers to give?

What I really suspect is that as far as you’re concerned, the problems that governments address far better than free market forces ever have been seen to address (promoting public health, safe working conditions, establishing a mandatory minimum wage, maintaining essential infrastructure, etc.) simply aren’t problems that NEED to be addressed.

So, given that the burden IS yours to show that ffree market forces are better at solving soceity’s problems than any other form of society, explain how they would address the problem of a single parent who is unable to command a sufficient income to provide for herself and her child.

Currently, there are state and federal programs that respond and provide subsidized housing, supplemental nutrition assistance (i.e., foodstamps), that provide health coverage (e.g., Medicaid), job training programs, etc.

What would the free market solution to this problem be? Indentured servitude? Or do you simply not see this a problem society needs to address such that your ‘solution’ takes the form of “Let them starve!”?

@JGC

This is not debatable.

If I decide I don’t want to work, should you be forced to fund my housing and food?

I’m the government. I now have control over your life JBC. Prove to me why I shouldn’t do this. Oh you can’t? Too bad. Now hand over 37% of your income to me.

Hey by the way I love this logic of “indentured servitude” without government.

WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK TAXES ARE?

If 37% of your income is taken away in taxes, that means that 37% of your labor was taken from you. This is literally slavery. Slavery is working and then having the fruits of your labor taken away from you.

Statist logic: “In the free-market people will enslave us and control our lives, therefore let’s create and defend a government that enslaves us and controls are lives.”

Brilliant thinking.

The greatest thing the government does is to let people do absolutely nothing and pretend that hey are helping society.

“It’s amazing to me how many people think that voting to have the government give poor people money is compassion. Helping poor and suffering people is compassion. Voting for our government to use guns to give money to help poor and suffering people is immoral self-righteous bullying laziness.” Penn Jillette

This is why the current system is so offensive. If I was a science bureaucrat and I used your tax money to study shrimp on treadmills, would you be happy? If I took your money by force and then used that money to study penis size of homosexuals versus heterosexuals (actual study), would you be happy?

Wouldn’t you prefer that money is spent on something that you think is important?

This is what you’re fundamentally too arrogant to understand, Delysid. I’d honestly answer your question NO.

That’s because I recognize that what I think is important doesn’t really matter. I’m not equipped to decide, alone, what grants should be funded and what shouldn’t. I’d rather have my tax money divided amongst the various fields of science by the experts in those fields. Not by dudes named Delysid or Tom Coburn who think they are the sole arbiters of what’s ‘important.’

Look, Delysid. I’ve encountered many of your type before. I went to college at a University that, for historical reasons, has a high concentration of dudes just like you. Several of them were even my close friends. Luckily, of the arrogant libertarians I was friends with, all but one has come around from that phase (the last one, absurdly rich from family money, is irredeemable). As others have mentioned, the catalyst in all 3 cases I’m thinking of was travel. Get out into the world, Delysid. You have lived in a very limited bubble, and therefore your data gathering is incomplete. Is it really scientific to make judgments about human nature when you’ve experienced such a small slice of what humanity actually is?

#443 Er… no, we are referring to the actual history of medicine, in which the system of apprenticeships was actually used, and nepotism actually was very common. That’s not revisionism. (Citation: For Fear of Pain: British Surgery 1790-1850)

Admissions systems and organized courses are designed to weed some of that out, and while they are not perfect, they *do* have a student depend on a large group of doctors and faculty rather than only one or two doctors for advancement.

I have asked you my question about climate change three times now, and you don’t answer.

I was actually willing to be convinced, having had a certain amount of skepticism about climate change earlier on (when there was less science about it), but since you won’t set any standard for the argument there doesn’t seem much point.

This is the second time I’ve asked about libertarianism, just in case you missed the first one.

What sort of evidence would convince you that libertarianism does not always offer the optimal solution?

^ with 10 % down and 90 % owing on margins.

@lilady

I’m an anarcho-capitalist who would setle for a nightwatchman state if I had to choose a state.

Are you talking about the Great Depression that was caused by government? How cute. Who better to fix a massive depression than the entity that caused the depression, right!?

http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/articles/09/GreatMythsOfTheGreatDepression.pdf

“Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.” Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke

Address the points made in #429.

Explain how Shay’s colleague would NOT die like a dog in a libertarian society.

Stop your hand-waving and whining. You answered my questions, I made points about your replies. Address them or admit you’re trolling.

If I was a science bureaucrat and I used your tax money to study shrimp on treadmills, would you be happy?

Oh, goody, rather than creating your own blunders à la Marie Curie, now you’re regurgitating things that you didn’t bother to examine during consumption. Identify the PI, the amount of the grant utilized, and what was being examined. Although this was NSF funded, it would help if you could relate this to your previously emphasized point that “the NIH isn’t exactly the conveniance of a drive-thru when it comes to grant money.”

Cherry Picking Troll…that’s the second time you made that statement,

Bernancke made that statement on the occasion of Milton Friedman’s 90th birthday. Bernancke was referring to the Federal Reserve during Friedman’s tenure, when the Fed didn’t do enough to avoid the Great Depression.

Did I miss something here? You haven’t replied to my question about the Income Tax you’ve paid during the past five years. Or are you an able-bodied, free-loading parasite, who enjoys the good life because others pay for the services a centeralized government provides.

Delysid: You’ve made it clear you don’t think current society works. We get that. Our point is that you keep dodging requests that you explain how a libertarian society would. That’s utterly dishonest.

The current situation has not lifted this young woman out of poverty. I don’t expect it to. It covers her basic needs for food, clothing, shelter and medical care. It isn’t nirvana and neither I nor anyone else here has ever said that it was.

You’re the one throwing out the absolutes and asking for acceptance without supporting documentation.

I am offering you the opportunity to explain how a libertarian society would address the needs of its most vulnerable members. That’s the question I’m asking and you keep avoiding.

@Shay

I think late onset mental retardation should be replaced with “socialist.”

How come not one person has defended government? The closest answer anyone has given is that “in a libertarian society people would be dying in the streets.”

I think late onset mental retardation should be replaced with “socialist.”

Ah, so you’re ableist too!

@lilady

Oh and the government taxed over 30% of what I earned substite teaching. At the time, despite having a Master of Science, I was pulling up dirty carpets and toilets out of apartments to eat. But then again I refused to take food stamps, unlike millions of others, instead working a minimum wage job for a few months until school started.

Stupidity shine:

I think late onset mental retardation should be replaced with “socialist.”

I thought about not saying a world and letting such phrase stand in all its glory but then, I felt the need to revisit and puke on all the oldies journals from an epoch which were the work of a popular movement:

Eugenics

Alain

At the time, despite having a Master of Science, I was pulling up dirty carpets and toilets out of apartments to eat.

Wouldn’t your recommended free market solution to this complaint be “Moved elsewhere, where you wouldn’t have had to pull up carpets and dirty toilets to eat”?

Not just a troll, a really, really incompetent and stupid one.

Troll: Many posters on this site have developmentally disabled children/family members.

Would you believe that some of the people that commented on this thread have been diagnosed with ASDs/Asperger Syndrome?

You’ve been busted, Troll.

http://www.dailypaul.com/283240/delysids-guide-to-thinking-and-debating-like-a-conspiracy-theorist

Stu: “Not just a troll, a really, really incompetent and stupid one.”

Yeah. I just now skip his comments, especially after seeing that because the history is not how he thought it was that we are presenting revisionist history.

@Krebiozen
Again you are spewing logical fallacies with X percentage agree with me and Y percentage do not. Being in the minority doesn’t make libertarianism wrong.

Wow, you completely failed to understand Krebiozen’s point at #511.

@Krebiozen and AdamG

HAHAHAHAH

I just realized something. “There is no consensus about the cause of the Great Depression.” Weird! Most economists, including many Keynsian economists, including the chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, are in consensus that the Federal Reserve played a role. Oh the irony of this!

@Narad

Let’s just use tax dollars to pay union workers a living wage to dig holes, then pay them more money to fill those holes back up.

Isn’t communist economics fun?

I took the job because I needed something for 3 months. It served its purpose.

Then I fail to understand why you’d resent that you had to also pull up carpets and toilets to eat–you accepted the free-market evaluation of the skillset you possesed, the value your employers placed on your labor, and as you indicate in return you received an acceptable amount of recompense (“it served its purpose”).

That said, can we return to the question I asked @480:
What would be the Libertarian or free market solution to the problem of single parents being unable to support themselves and their children?

I will also be $330,000 in debt to trian in a profession that gives back to society more than any other- medicine dentistry.

FTFY. How you’re going to be “giv[ing] back to society” remains thoroughly unclear, since you don’t exactly seem like the type to go into underserved populations.

Anyway, how exactly is this not the market at work? UCLA currently comes in at $304,000 by their own estimate (I presume this is the nonresident cost); if you don’t want to go someplace cheaper, such as Texas A&M’s Baylor College, which was $113,957 in the 2010–2011 ADA survey, why are you touting the $330,000? Hell, why not tell everyone what the school is, so that your audience can get an idea of the admission standards of a very top tier school?

Funny how he can argue for a “hypothetical” over reality, without providing a single instance where said “hypothetical” was attempted and was proven to be successful.

Seems pretty stupid to me..

It is pretty difficult to save capital when the Fed prints billions of dollars at will

It’s also pretty hard to save capital when you make $1.50 an hour, but let me guess — you don’t give a crap about that, do you.

When did I say there is no reasons for unions to exist? People should have the right to free association. But if a union member applied to work for me, I would just laugh.

You’re a miserable excuse for a human being. I wash my hands and feet of you. If it didn’t hurt me or others I would love for you to open up your practice in a nice libertarian society and have someone open up a competing one next door — someone without any education or certification, or $300,000 of debt, and charging half your prices.

@Stu

$1.50 an hour used to be an enormous wage. What happened? Why don’t you explain to me WHY $1.50 an hour doesn’t buy shit today?

Do you understand economics? Do you understand cause and effect? Or do you just have a primitive worldview in which you can only look at the present circumstances and give emotional opinions about it?